Gen Z is changing the rules of work, and the results are redefining what professional success looks like in 2025. According to a new Glassdoor report, “career minimalism” is at the heart of this shift: Younger workers see their jobs as a means to financial stability, saving real passion and ambition for hours off the clock and increasingly lucrative side hustles.
Forget the corner office. Glassdoor’s latest survey, canvassing more than 1,000 professionals in the U.S., revealed that the younger cohort of workers is skeptical of the concept of management. A striking 68% of Gen Z respondents said they wouldn’t pursue management if it weren’t for paycheck or title. To be sure, more money and a higher title have always been powerful draws for workers to go into management, but this still signals a rejection of the traditional corporate climb favored by boomers and millennials and a sentiment that management is seen as something of a poisoned chalice. Gen Z, after all, is the generation that brought the concepts of “quiet quitting” and “conscious unbossing” into the zeitgeist.
“We’ve traded the rigid career ladder for the career lily pad,” said Morgan Sanner, Glassdoor’s Gen Z career expert and founder of Resume Official, calling it “a path where we can jump to whatever opportunity fits best at the moment. In the long run, that kind of flexibility is more sustainable, more realistic, and better suited to today’s workplace realities.”
Gen Z isn’t actually avoiding management
The survey, however, is somewhat at odds with other data collected by Glassdoor. Daniel Zhao, chief economist for the company, told Fortune in a late July interview that Glassdoor’s biannual Worklife Trends report had found Gen Z to be entering the ranks of management at the same rates that millennials and other generations did.
