Blue employee

What matters to Tariq?

• Single-employer career
• Personal development
• Personal retirement planning

Employee profile

• People are graded and profiled at the age of 16 and categorised for work suitability both in terms of capability and individual preference.
• The top talent is highly prized and fought over. In most cases people are linked to an organisation by the age of 18.
• University education is managed by the company according to the organisational career path chosen by the individual.
• At the top level, employees take far greater control of their careers; many senior executives retain their personal agents to find the best roles and deals.
• Lower-level employees also take active charge of their careers; they are aware of the value that their human capital represents and are demanding about the circumstances in which they will invest that capital.
• Those outside the corporate sphere find employment choices are limited to smaller companies which are unable to provide the same level of development and financial benefits.

What matters to a Blue World employee?

The concept of portfolio careers in the future is not a reality for us

A theory apparently turned on its head is that working for multiple employers over a career lifetime. The vast majority of respondents said that they will have between two and five employers (75%). Only 7% believe they will have ten or more employers. By region, Middle East and Africa respondents were the most likely to think they would have more than ten employers (11%). Only 10% of North Americans thought they would have more than six employers. By country, Spain and Turkey seemed the most inclined to portfolio working.

But millennials did expect a certain degree of job mobility, with 30% saying they would like to stay within the same organisation, but in a variety of roles and fields. Only 17% of the sample expected to remain within the same organisation and in the same field.

Almost half of the respondents (48%) in South Africa expected to have multiple roles in multiple organisations. Brazilian respondents seem the most committed to the employer, with almost one third expecting to stay in the same field in the same organisation.

+ PwC point of view

These findings seem to dispel the idea of employees job-hopping in a portfolio-working arrangement. This was an idea much touted in the early 1990s as the future of work. But clearly this audience do not think it will happen, and may therefore not be prepared to cope if it does.

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We prefer development opportunities rather than cash bonuses

We were surprised by the results of this part of the survey. When we asked what benefits they would value most over the next five years, almost one third of respondents chose training and development as their first choice after salary. This was three times higher than those who chose cash bonuses as their first choice.

Only 7% cited time off for doing charity or community work as a top three benefit. Yet we saw how important corporate responsibility values were to millennials in our earlier questions on the subject. Perhaps they see this as more of the employer’s responsibility than a personal one?

In terms of development 98% of the sample stated working with strong coaches and mentors was important to their personal development. All aspects of personal development scored very high in the survey. The least important was e-learning, but even e-learning was cited to be very important or quite important by 62% of the sample.

Personally I find it very important that personal coaching is present. I think support for masters programmess and professional designations will continue to increase. It is what graduates like me want and are now able to demand from employers.

+ PwC point of view

We would challenge whether business leaders are actually attuned to the importance of development opportunities to this group. In fact, our experience is that in many sectors training and development budgets are usually the first to be hit when the business or the market are doing badly.

The very high results for advocating coaches and mentors are also a key issue for businesses to take away from this study. Most employers only provide coaches and mentors to more senior individuals in the organisation. Younger workers are usually given more vocational/educational training opportunities.

The context of the question asked for views on their preferences over the next five years. So we feel there is a gap between the personal development aspirations of millennials and where companies typically invest their training and development budgets particularly in a one-to-one coaching context.

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I will have to take personal responsibility for funding my retirement

Millennials have accepted the idea that neither the state nor their employer will fund their retirement, with over half (57%) saying they expected to fund their own retirement through personal investments and saving plans.

Respondents in Australasia had the highest percentage who expected their retirement to be funded personally (76%), those in Asia has the lowest (38%) with over a quarter of Asian respondents expecting their employer’s retirement scheme to meet their needs. Germans had the highest percentage among those who expected their retirement to be funded personally (90%), while the Dutch had the lowest (27%). Forty-one percent of respondents from the Netherlands expected their retirement to be funded by their employer’s retirement scheme (the highest percentage across all the countries), compared with 0% of those in Germany.

I think that it is extremely important to have a good pension scheme, as the governments scheme fails to keep up with the cost of living. Therefore, as I get older, this will be one of my main criteria when picking who to work for.

+ PwC point of view

The high profile in recent years of company pension deficits in defined benefit schemes, may have led our millennials to conclude that they will need to fund their own retirement. This may be particularly true of Germany where companies have suffered crippling pension deficits for the last decade. Meanwhile in the US, until very recently, it was generally believed that very low (or negative) savings rates would not ultimately affect the economy, because Baby Boomers would be able to retire on the asset price and housing price growth without saving out of earnings. (During the 2000s, Americans have reduced their disposable income savings rate to close to 0%¹. ) We believe that these factors, compounded by the global financial crisis, may have influenced the millennials' resignation to self-funding their retirement.

¹ Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Economist Intelligence Unit, PwC analysis

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