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Where should you be in your career by the time you are in your late 20s?

A generation ago, most employees in that age group would have been content doing time as an underling and slowly climbing the ladder to a managerial position in their 30s or 40s.

But workers today in their mid- to late 20s are facing the challenges and stresses of management much sooner. Taking on responsibility earlier is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception.

"The contrast is quite stark," says Brian Quirke, an executive coach at PHR Consulting. "At that age 20 years ago you were probably not yet in a management role. You'd been to university, you'd got a secure job and you were probably supervising but were barely at the early management stage.
"Today we are seeing people running significant businesses in their late 20s to early 30s and, in some of the banking and finance areas, holding very significant jobs by 25."

If the current crop of employees aged over 50 are scratching their heads wondering how all this transpired, they need to consider a number of factors. Part of it, Quirke says, relates to the simplification of company structures, while skill shortages in nearly every industry also have played a role.

"I think also that the paradigm of age and experience being the precursor to management is no longer the case," he says. "Once, there was an expectation that you were promoted to management more on the basis of your age and the time you'd been in the organisation than on the skill set that you had for management and leadership."

The dazzling speed of progression to management isn't the only difference between today's worker and those of previous generations. Many are opting for a series of career changes, particularly early on in their working lives.

Take the case of 22-year-old Andrew Roden, who is already in his third job. After successfully running his own table-tennis coaching business after leaving school, he took a sales role with a big sporting goods chain. Then came a TAFE course in computer networking before he secured another retail role, this time with an international computer games company. He now works as assistant manager at the chain's Penrith store and sees no limits to his options.

"I see myself somewhere in the future doing computers but I don't know what yet," he says. "In the short-term I want to be a store manager in my current company, do that for another two years, then maybe jump overseas with the same company if I can. Moving up through the ranks has been pretty quick for me. Then again, I may jump to another job because I could be sick of it by then."

Andrew's experience is far different to that of his father. At 22, Leigh Roden was still in the formative stages of an 11-year retail career. "When I started out in work it was all to do with having something for life or the best part of your life," says Leigh, now a 56-year-old procurement consultant. "You went into something not really knowing if it was what you wanted to do. But when you got in there it was really to stay, to grow in that business."

Today, he believes rapid career progression is an avowed goal for members of his son's generation. "They expect it because everything they do and everything around them is operating at the same pace. They do what they want to do as quickly as they can. They're not going to sit around waiting for the company to decide what to do with them. They make those choices and decisions themselves."

The managing director of recruitment firm Future Prospects, Philip Goldstein, agrees. He says the attitude of today's young employees is having a major impact on their vocational development.

"Generally speaking, the younger members of society have grown up in a different world to the one we grew up in. They have been in an environment where there have been lots more opportunities. As children they have been brought up in much more comfortable surroundings. They have been able to be children for longer. There's a feeling that there's more to be had. People are wanting to move on much quicker than they [used to]."

Aged in his early 50s, Goldstein is also quick to identify the trend of career fast tracking. "There are still some organisations that are reluctant to push young people forward, who still have the concept of age equals experience," he says. "On the other hand, you've got a lot of industries such as IT, advertising, marketing and finance, which are much more youthful in their focus who are quite happy to bring young kids along and push them into management jobs at a fairly early age.

"There are a lot of 30-year-old CEOs of small companies. There's lots of young people starting businesses or joining young businesses and moving quickly through the ranks, much more so than when we were coming through the ranks."
 
First published 30/8/2008