insider@insider.com (Juliana Kaplan)
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As workers quit en masse and jobs continue to open, job hunters are still struggling to find the right job.
A FlexJobs survey of 1,800 unemployed workers find that nearly half are frustrated with the search.
Many are only finding low-paying positions, showing a labor mismatch still persists.
Millions of Americans are unemployed, millions are quitting their jobs, and employers are struggling to find workers, as the labor market poses a mismatch between open position and what workers want. New data suggests it's worse than a mismatch: the jobs on offer just aren't good enough.
A survey of 1,800 workers by remote and flexible jobs site FlexJobs found that workers are still dissatisfied, even amidst what should be a hot job market as openings skyrocket - alongside workers leaving roles en masse. But of those workers surveyed, 48% said they're "frustrated with their job search" - because they're not finding the right positions.
And 41% said there "aren't enough openings in their preferred professions." It could be due to a proliferation of low-wage jobs, since 46% said they were only findings opening for low-wage roles.
Mismatches are a major driver of the labor shortage
Slide 5 of 11: This debt is way more than what Gen X and boomers had at age 40 — $94,000 and $112,000, respectively, Bloomberg reported.One might first look to student loans as the source of this debt. College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s, and student-loan debt reached a national high of $1.5 trillion in 2019. Many millennials are shouldering their share of this burden.The typical 40-year-old millennial entered college in 1999, and graduated in 2003 (under a typical four-year plan). According to an analysis by the research team at Education Data, 73% of students graduating that year took out a student loan. That year, the average debt at graduation per student was $16,070, equivalent to $22,170 today.But that's not as much as the typical youngest millennial, who turns 25 this year. They graduated with about $29,500 in student debt.
5/11 SLIDES © Jacquelyn Martin/AP
THEY ALSO HAVE $128,000 IN DEBT. WHILE SOME OF THIS MAY BE FROM STUDENT LOANS, THEY DON'T CARRY THE WEIGHT OF STUDENT DEBT AS MUCH AS YOUNGER MILLENNIALS.
This debt is way more than what Gen X and boomers had at age 40 — $94,000 and $112,000, respectively, Bloomberg reported.
One might first look to student loans as the source of this debt. College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s, and student-loan debt reached a national high of $1.5 trillion in 2019. Many millennials are shouldering their share of this burden.
The typical 40-year-old millennial entered college in 1999, and graduated in 2003 (under a typical four-year plan). According to an analysis by the research team at Education Data, 73% of students graduating that year took out a student loan. That year, the average debt at graduation per student was $16,070, equivalent to $22,170 today.
But that's not as much as the typical youngest millennial, who turns 25 this year. They graduated with about $29,500 in student debt.
It's another data point that speaks to the prevalence of mismatches in the current economy. The right-leaning Chamber of Commerce has said that labor shortages are being fueled, in part, by a mismatch between open roles and workers' skills. At the same time, job openings have been high in traditionally low-paying industries like leisure and hospitality, where workers have been quitting en masse and demanding higher wages.
The disjointedness between what unemployed workers are looking for and what's available could also potentially put some pressure on wages. While 85% of the workers surveyed by FlexJobs said they'd take a pay cut if it meant getting a job, only 12% of those workers would take a "serious pay cut" - which is defined as over 20%.
Unemployed workers who were set to lose their enhanced benefits early previously told Insider that the low wages of the open positions wouldn't be enough for them to survive on. If those wages rose enough to meet the pay cut professional workers are willing to take, it could potentially help with staffing.
In the meantime, the imminent end of enhanced unemployment benefits in September could only exacerbate the mismatch issues.
"Unfortunately, this may create an even more difficult situation for unemployed professionals," Brie Reynolds, career development manager and coach at FlexJobs and Remote.co, wrote in an email to Insider. "As our survey found, the vast majority of unemployed people are actively and consistently searching for a new job, but they're trying to navigate an unprecedented labor market with a lot of uncertainty."
Gallery: Meet the typical 40-year-old millennial, who has $128,000 in debt, is not nearly as wealthy as their parents were, and is known as 'geriatric' (Business Insider)
The oldest millennials turn 40 this year.
They have less wealth, more debt, and about the same earnings as past generations at their age.
They straddle the digital worlds of old PCs and today's social-media apps
THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL WAS ONE OF THOSE HARDEST HIT BY THE GREAT RECESSION.
When the 2007 financial crisis began, the 40-year-old millennial was 26, an age at which most of the generation hadn't yet accumulated substantial wealth. It's this cohort that bore the true brunt of the financial crisis, which left lingering effects a dozen years later when the coronavirus recession rolled around.
From the very beginning of their careers, they entered a dismal labor market that set them up for a long recovery.
"Millennials have lifelong damage, given the severity of the Great Recession," Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at the Brookings Institution, previously told Insider, adding that "older millennials were squarely hammered."
THEIR EARLY POST-GRADUATE YEARS WERE MARKED BY A TOUGH JOB MARKET THAT LED TO WAGE STAGNATION. THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD MILLENNIAL EARNS $73,000 A YEAR.
Boomers earned about $72,000 at that age, while Gen X earned around $68,000, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Federal Reserve data (The Fed data is based on households and age of the person responding to the Fed survey). That's all to say, wages have remained stagnant since 1989.
Wages haven't kept up with soaring living costs for everything from healthcare to housing, creating a financial imbalance that's been difficult for the 40-year-old millennial to rectify.
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IT'S MADE BUILDING WEALTH DIFFICULT. WITH A NET WORTH OF $91,000, THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD MILLENNIAL IS ONLY 80% AS WEALTHY AS THEIR PARENTS WERE AT THEIR AGE.
At age 40, Gen X was worth $94,000. Boomers held $112,000 in wealth at that age, according to Bloomberg.
But the oldest millennials are catching up. A 2018 St. Louis Fed study originally found that those born in the 1980s have median levels 34% below older generations, causing the Fed to deem them at risk of becoming a "lost generation" for wealth accumulation.
"Not only is their wealth shortfall in 2016 very large in percentage terms, but the typical 1980s family actually lost ground in relative terms between 2010 and 2016, a period of rapidly rising asset values that buoyed the wealth of all older cohorts," the 2018 report read.
A follow-up study in 2021 found 1980s millennials gained some ground, narrowing their wealth deficit to 11%. "It turns out that millennials may not be as 'lost' as we once thought," according to the report
IT'S LIKELY A GOOD CHUNK OF THAT DEBT COMES FROM A MORTGAGE. THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL OWNS A HOME.
According to an Insider analysis of 2019 American Community Survey microdata from the University of Minnesota's IPUMS program, 61.9% of 40-year-old millennials (who were 38 when the survey was taken) own a home.
Bug that's still lower than previous generations at that age: 68% of Gen X and 66% for boomers. As housing prices climbed over the years, millennials began renting longer and buying later. While some have finally been able to afford a house amid low interest rates during the pandemic, the demand has exacerbated a historic housing shortage that has pushed homeownership further out of reach for other millennials.
The homeowning life stage means that most 40-year-old millennials have a mortgage. It aligns with previous findings from an Insider and Morning Consult survey, which found that it's not just student-loan debt millennials are swimming in. A mortgage is typically their biggest debt, the survey found.
THEY ALSO HAVE KIDS. ACHIEVING THESE STANDARD LIFE MILESTONES IS A SIGN THAT MANY HAVE CAUGHT UP FROM THE DELAYED EFFECTS OF THE GREAT RECESSION.
"The oldest millennials delayed many of the traditional markers of adulthood, such as marriage, kids, and buying homes, as they went through the eye of the Great Recession and the long and uneven recovery afterward," Jason Dorsey, a consultant and president of the Center for Generational Kinetics, previously told Insider.
As millennials delay marriage and homeownership, they've delayed childbearing until they feel more financially sound. More women are having kids at a later age than ever.
But as of 2019, 66% of 40-year-old millennials (who were 38 at the time), have kids, according Insider's analysis of 2019 American Community Survey microdata from the University of Minnesota's IPUMS program.
BUT THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL DISSOCIATES FROM THEIR GENERATION. CAUGHT BETWEEN GEN X AND MILLENNIALS, THEY ALMOST FEEL GENERATIONLESS.
As Alisha Tillery wrote for Shondaland, being the oldest millennial "is to be an outlier of sorts, to really have no generation to identify with at all, yet be perfectly okay with not fitting into one box or the other."
"We are caught in a tight space that remembers the days of old (before Google, Facebook, and YouTube), but is also intrigued by the future and a new way of doing things," she added.
Jessica Guinn Johnson, an attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, born in 1981, told Tillery, "I never found that I fit in the millennial mold, but identified more with Gen X."
Robert L. Reece, a University of Texas at Austin sociology professor, told Tillery there's validity in classifying oneself as a millennial but not identifying with the typical characteristics of the generation.
© Noam Galai/Getty Images
IT EXPLAINS WHY THE 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL IS LARGELY SEEN AS BEING PART OF A MICROGENERATION, FOR WHICH THERE HAVE BEEN MANY NAMES.
As Tillery wrote, some millennials feel they better identify with the "cusper" (someone who straddles two generations) term "Xennial." It describes a micro-generation "that serves as a bridge between the disaffection of Gen X and the blithe optimism of millennials," Sarah Stankorb wrote for Good Magazine in 2014.
In a Medium article that went viral in the spring, author and leadership expert Erica Dhawan called the micro-generation that the 40-year-old millennial falls into "geriatric millennials," which she defines as those born between 1980 and 1985. What sets them apart, she recently told Insider, is their experience with technology.
THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL REMEMBERS PCS, THE DAYS OF EARLY DIAL-UP, AND MYSPACE, BUT ALSO FEELS COMFORTABLE ON TIKTOK AND CLUBHOUSE.
Whereas younger millennials don't know a world without digital tools as a primary form of communication, the eldest millennials remember when they were very primitive.
"They were the first generation to grow up with a PC in their homes. They joined the first social media communities on Facebook and MySpace. They remember dial-up connections, collect calls, and punch cards," Dhawan previously told Insider, adding they also remember things like Napster for burning CDs, as well as the regular flip phone.
But while they're fluent in the early days of the internet and digital technology, they've also been able to easily adapt to newer forms of digital media, like TikTok, which may be unfamiliar to older generations like baby boomers and commonplace among younger generations like Gen Z.
"This is a unique cohort that straddles digital natives and digital adapters," Dhawan said.
BUT STRADDLING A DIGITAL DIVIDE MEANS THE TYPICAL 40-YEAR-OLD MILLENNIAL IS AN ASSET IN THE WORKFORCE.
With the skills of both older and younger generations, Dhawan said, they can bridge communication styles in the workplace.
For example, she said, a geriatric millennial would know to send a Slack message to a Gen Z coworker instead of calling them out of the blue, which they might find alarming. But they would also know to be mindful of an older coworker's video background and help walk them through such technology.
"They can help straddle the divide," she said. "They can teach traditional communication skills to some of those younger employees and digital body language to older team members."
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