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.
