Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-07
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Jean Pralong, Professor of Human Resource Management, EM Normandie
They are said to be less involved, in the best case. Young people are blamed for many ills in the professional world. But what if their behavior actually revealed a very great rationality? It’s well known, you always get what you pay for…
Polls, conferences or articles on the “Generation Z”, born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, succeed one another and, along with them, narratives as predictable asthe Lakes of Connemara, by Michel Sardou, at a wedding evening.Young people no longer want to work, and 57% of business leaders consider them less committed; 77% find them less willing to answer the phone outside of working hours, or to do unpaid overtime (!). They are demanding and disloyal (53%). Furthermore, employers find it difficult to offer remuneration that young people would find attractive (56%). Yet, this youth is “more innovative” (51%), “more at ease with AI” (90%).
In summary, they would be “incomprehensible” (70% of managers struggle to understand their aspirations) and above all very “different from previous generations” (86%).
Organized insecurity
Those with even more sour minds will easily find several surveys from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago telling the same story with only slight nuances. Why this stability of stereotypes, when 84% of young people say they like work or when 73% accept tasks outside their job description? A clue: 58% of employers admit they do not offer attractive salaries and 80% acknowledge that this is the cause of their difficulties in recruiting.
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Clichés abound and mask a much more prosaic reality. Expected everywhere, young people are notin finerecruited nowhere. Their integration paths, riddled with obstacles, are the symptom of a system which, while celebrating youth, keeps it in precariousness.
The diploma is not enough
Young people are graduated, qualified, and yet underemployed.According to Céreq, 23% of holders of a CAP or a BEP are unemployed one year after leaving the education system; 45% of those with a two-year post-secondary degree hold jobs that do not correspond to their level of qualification, and 30% of young higher education graduates find themselves in fixed-term contracts or temporary work within two years of graduating.
One in three young people (under 26 years old) in mainland France has experienced aperiod of unemployment of more than six months within the three years following the end of their studies). Youth is not a problem, but rather a reflection of a fractured labor market, where social and territorial inequalities weigh more heavily than diplomas.
Beware of stereotypes
The slowness of professional integration is less due to the young people themselves than to the stereotypes attributed to them. As shown byOlivier Galland, youth is a recent social construct in Europe. Before the 20theIn the century, the transition to adulthood was marked by clear and simultaneous rites: entry into working life, marriage, and leaving the family home. The three were linked: obtaining an independent income made marriage and access to one’s own home possible.
Throughout the 20th centuryeIn this century, these three stages have separated. Thus, some young people leave their families without income, especially to study, others form couples without having a stable job, and others still work but remain under the family roof…
And “youth” was invented as a suspended phase between childhood and adulthood, defined not by age, but by criteria synonymous with instability: one is young as long as one is neither in a long-term relationship, nor in a stable job, nor living in one’s own household.
Youth is therefore, by definition, a “deviance”: it is a stage of life defined by its deviations from the norm. That is why stories about young people always develop the same themes of immaturity. From then on, trials become legitimate: internships, fixed-term contracts, renewed probation periods and therecent “precarious permanent contract” proposed by Medefare the control tools derived from the same suspicions.
A vicious circle that produces mistrust
This systematic mistrust has concrete consequences. Young people accumulate devalued experiences that trap them in a vicious circle. The more chaotic their paths are, the more employers become wary… and the more chaotic their paths become. Repeated hardships shape in young people professional imaginations marked by mistrust. These beliefs, born from experience, become survival rules.
Some young people, for example, downplay their expectations in interviews so as not to scare off. But they think no less, especially in regard to their degrees and skills. Others, tired of being offered unpaid internships, refuse to play along and adopt a posture of resistance — ironic, disillusioned, or caricatured as “detached.”
And the vicious circle closes. The behaviors adopted by young people to protect themselves are interpreted as evidence of their immaturity. Thus, some young people end up giving credence to those who criticize them – not because they truly fit these stereotypes, but because the system pushes them there.
The myth of the war of the ages
The “generation war” never took place. What is seen as generational flaws is only a reflection of a system that, while celebrating youth, keeps it in precariousness. Young people are not “difficult”: they are clear-sighted. They do not “lack realism”; they have too much.
To get out of this deadlock, it would be necessary to acknowledge that the slowness of their integration is not a choice, but a consequence of inequalities that weigh more heavily than diplomas, of a structural mistrust towards a youth kept in limbo, and of a labor market that demands everything but offers only scraps. Their behaviors are not a rejection of work, but a sign that they have understood: in a system that does not keep its promises, the only possible resistance is to no longer take it seriously.
Jean Pralong does not work for, advise, hold shares in, or receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institution.
–ref. Expected everywhere, recruited nowhere: some realities about the professional integration of young people –https://theconversation.com/expected-everywhere-recruited-nowhere-some-realities-on-the-professional-integration-of-youth-277766