The normal company playbook has lengthy equated ambition with velocity. Climb the ladder shortly, acquire promotions, chase greater paychecks and ultimately transfer into management. However Singapore’s youthful workforce is more and more rejecting this one-size-fits-all definition of success.
As an alternative, Gen Zs and millennials are making extra deliberate, calculated selections about their careers, prioritizing stability, abilities improvement, wellbeing and objective over speedy development. In line with Deloitte’s newest World 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, half of Gen Zs and millennials in Singapore have postponed main life selections due to their monetary circumstances, whereas solely a minority see management as their major profession aspiration. But, that is removed from a era missing drive or ambition. Fairly, they’re redefining what progress appears to be like like.
Mark Nicholas Teoh, Human Capital Chief, Deloitte South-East Asia, believes this shift represents a profound change in how youthful staff consider their careers. “The largest shift is in what counts as progress,” he says. “Fifteen years in the past, success was measured by the velocity of the climb: title, promotion, pay. At present’s Gen Zs and millennials measure success by whether or not the climb is sustainable.”
The survey discovered that solely about one-quarter of Gen Zs and one-fifth of millennials in Singapore search fast-paced profession development. As an alternative, most choose regular progress, whereas round one in 5 are prepared to maneuver laterally and even settle for extra junior roles if it results in a greater long-term match.
“Ambition has not fallen,” Teoh says. “The standards for fulfillment have modified.”
See additionally: Why Gen Z, millennials are turning to ‘facet jobs’ to remain afloat
The rise of discernment
This yr’s report describes the attitudes of youthful staff as “a coming-of-age story not of delay, however of discernment”. The excellence is important for employers.
“Delay implies these generations will ultimately revert to conventional timelines, permitting employers to attend them out,” says Teoh. “Discernment suggests they’re making deliberate decisions about when and beneath what situations they commit, and so they intend to carry these requirements.”
Certainly, the survey paints an image of a workforce grappling with vital financial pressures. Price of dwelling stays the highest concern amongst each Gen Zs and millennials in Singapore, and housing affordability continues to affect profession selections for a lot of respondents. Greater than half report delaying main milestones reminiscent of marriage, beginning a household or pursuing additional schooling due to monetary constraints.
But, regardless of these pressures, youthful staff should not standing nonetheless.
“They’re sequencing, not stalling,” Teoh explains. “The identical respondents who’ve postponed main life selections are investing laborious in abilities and adaptableness.”
This has essential implications for employers.
“In observe, employers in Singapore are inspired to cease designing careers round a single, linear monitor,” he says. “Reward breadth and lateral motion as indicators of excessive efficiency, quite than as drift. The employers who mistake selectiveness for a scarcity of drive threat dropping precisely the expertise they want to retain.”
Employers are forward within the AI race
If there may be one space the place Gen Zs and millennials in Singapore are shifting quicker than their employers, it’s AI. The survey discovered that 88% of Gen Zs and 86% of millennials in Singapore use AI of their day-to-day work, considerably greater than international averages. But fewer than one-third consider the AI instruments supplied by their employers are ample.
To Teoh, this disconnect reveals an uncomfortable fact. “The inversion tells us people are adopting at shopper velocity whereas organizations undertake at enterprise velocity,” he says, noting that the divide is wider in Singapore than in most markets.
The issue, in his view, is that almost all organizations stay in “use-case mode”—pilots and proofs of idea that work in isolation however don’t embed AI into how work truly will get achieved. He cites Deloitte analysis findings indicating that greater than 4 in 5 organizations globally haven’t redesigned jobs to include AI capabilities. “Regardless of the workforce adapting to AI, the character of labor stays stagnant,” he provides.
Closing that hole, he argues, means redesigning roles in order that the division of labor between people and AI is express, rebuilding workflows in order that the know-how sits inside the course of quite than alongside it, equipping managers to steer that redesign and constructing governance into the instruments themselves. The urge for food amongst staff is there: Forty % of Gen Zs and 47% of millennials in Singapore say they are going to proceed to hunt new AI coaching because the know-how evolves, once more forward of worldwide ranges.
Management with out burnout
The survey additionally challenges typical assumptions about management ambition. Whereas 81% of Gen Zs and 67% of millennials in Singapore say they’re desirous about management roles sooner or later of their careers, solely 6% and three%, respectively, establish management as their major profession aim.
Removed from signaling a scarcity of ambition, Teoh believes these findings level to one thing deeper. “This era is redefining ambition,” he says. “Management, because the function is at the moment constructed, has not confirmed its value.”
Stress, burnout, extreme accountability and the perceived sacrifice of labor/life steadiness are among the many key the explanation why youthful staff hesitate to pursue management positions. “This isn’t a rejection of management, however a judgment on the best way this function is commonly structured,” says Teoh.
He pointed to 1 discovering he known as notably telling: These already in senior roles are likely to report higher psychological well being and work/life steadiness than their subordinates, and are much less more likely to cite lengthy hours as a supply of stress. The wariness, in different phrases, could also be formed by how administration appears to be like from the surface—“always-on and always receiving strain”—quite than the way it truly feels to do.
The danger of misreading this pattern, he says, is twofold. “Employers who conclude ‘no one needs to steer’ will under-invest of their pipeline, simply as boomer retirements make succession planning extra pressing,” Teoh says.
And those that fail to reframe the notion of management could watch their most succesful folks pursue it elsewhere. “The repair to this subject isn’t motivational—it’s structural,” he says, pointing to sustainable workloads, real flexibility and credible pathways to development.
A workforce in transition
Beneath these themes runs a longer-term concern. As boomers retire, millennials and Gen Zs step up, and Gen Alpha approaches, Singapore is getting into what the report calls a once-in-a-generation workforce transition—and confidence in continuity is skinny. Simply 44% of Gen Zs and 61% of millennials consider their workforce may keep efficiency if a key skilled left tomorrow.
Teoh framed the problem as one among “expertise structure”: how organizations assist folks construct judgment when the normal methods of growing it are eroding at each ends of the workforce, as consultants retire and AI absorbs the entry-level duties that after shaped the primary rungs of the ladder. The obstacles respondents cite are largely structural: Forty-four % of Gen Zs level to a scarcity of incentives or recognition for sharing information and 35% to a scarcity of time, whereas millennials most frequently cite the absence of normal templates or instruments (39%) and confidentiality issues (32%). “The system doesn’t present an incentive to go it on,” Teoh says.
In the end, organizations that thrive within the years forward shall be people who embed studying, apprenticeship and shared decision-making instantly into work design.
“Concord workshops and reverse-mentoring schemes may be useful, however they don’t transfer judgment at scale. Redesigned roles, shared selections and structured apprenticeship inside the true work do,” Teoh concludes. “The organizations that get this proper will quietly compound a bonus yr after yr, and those that don’t could solely acknowledge the fee when an skilled leaves.”
