NewGen newjob: The new professional ambitions of young graduates

The NewGen Talent Centre decrypts the aspirations, behaviours and abilities of new-generation professionals in order to help employers respond to the challenges of attracting, retaining and engaging young talent. Since its creation in 2013, the centre has endeavoured to dismantle stereotypical views on new generations, whether regarding their supposed disenchantment with companies or their caricatures as environmental protestors or ambitious careerists.

This new research seeks to explore and provide insight into the diversity of ambitions harboured by new-generation professionals and to reveal their preferences and the potential they offer for companies.

“Students are professionally ambitious, but their ambitions are multiple and multi-form. Although a very large majority of them have a positive view of businesses, they don’t all aspire to the same career and don’t imagine reaching fulfilment in the same way ”

Manuelle Malot, Director of the NewGen Talent Centre

By defining their professional ambitions, respondents identified themselves with five profiles, three of which are particularly pronounced:

• Competitor profiles (31% of respondents) are motivated by rapid access to professional responsibilities. They are focused on ambitious career development and motivated by senior management positions, hierarchical responsibility and attractive remuneration.
• Engaged profiles (23%) are motivated by their social usefulness. They are focused on issues affecting the world and motivated by the public interest and by the company’s culture and values and the usefulness of their job.
• Entrepreneur profiles (17%) are motivated by the freedom of action of entrepreneurship. They are focused on the corporate project and motivated by the challenge and autonomy of their job.

Lastly, there are two groups with less distinct contours: collaborative profiles (17%), who define themselves as attached to collective ambition, and epicurean profiles (12%), who are focused on a work-life balance.

To sum up, enterprise, engagement, assumption of responsibilities are therefore diverse and strong ambitions that define groups that possess their own aspirations and behaviours.