A Good Time to Hunker Down

After years of restless job-hopping, a member of the oft-derided millennial generation finds it's a relief to get work she can dig her teeth into

by Lindsey Gerdes

"You're young! Get out of here and have some fun." This was a command routinely echoed by well-meaning senior colleagues last summer when they caught me hunched over my desk at some particularly odd hour. During that period I was slowly tackling the many aspects of pulling together the new ranking on the best entry-level employers, an extensive undertaking that required some long (and strange) hours.

I tried assuring these well-intentioned co-workers—who seemed genuinely concerned that a young, formerly social colleague seemed permanently chained to her desk—that I didn't mind logging these additional hours. I told them I knew that in just a few months the project would be finished and I could lead a more balanced life. What I didn't know how to tell them was that even though this should have been one of the most stressful and chaotic periods of my working life, I was more content and even-keeled than I had been in a long while.

What Color Is My Parachute?

I didn't know how to express that sometimes "being young"—having no one to answer to but yourself and acting accordingly—can be more exhausting than an 80-hour work week. I'd spent so much time during my first few years after college trying to establish a foothold in the publishing industry that when I did find something I truly enjoyed and could focus on completely, it was a huge relief. Working was a reprieve from the uncertainty of exploring endless but vague job possibilities that could well be dead ends.

Before finding this opportunity at BusinessWeek I had bounced from internship to temp assignment to freelancing gig to part-time odd job to full-time grad-school applicant (followed by a change of heart) to a marketing contract employee. Then it was back to square one, another internship (this one at BusinessWeek, which eventually led to my job here).

This constant job-changing was disconcerting. I had always imagined building a career as climbing rungs on a ladder, not playing a continual game of Chutes & Ladders.

I'm hardly alone in having job-hopped so much in my early 20s—or in experiencing the stress that often comes with it. Take my seven college "draw mates," the friends who I lived with for most of college.

Of the eight of us, there isn't a single person who has remained in one job—or in one city for that matter—since graduation almost four years ago. The least number of jobs any of us has had is two; the most is six.

Almost all of us have worked in more than one industry in our brief postcollegiate careers, and all of us have worked in at least two cities. Five of the eight have either received or are pursuing graduate degrees.

Restless Millennials

I could rattle off countless other instances of friends and acquaintances who have done similar hopscotching; which more often than not has included forays into different industries, various types of employment (temp, part-time, salaried, etc.), and often a period spent pursuing a nontraditional opportunity (volunteer work, an artistic interest, travel). And there are those like me who have done all of the above.

I realize that we "millennials" are often derided as coddled, entitled, carefree job-hoppers who are loathe to settle down, preferring to indulge in a prolonged adolescence of sorts. The journalists and academics who chronicle us focus on where this inability to settle down comes from. They contend that it's not a manifestation of youthful rebellion but the result of being raised by helicopter parents, whose constant hovering and hand-holding has gone on long beyond our adolescence.

While I won't argue with their view of how we were raised, I don't think that style of upbringing has led to the baseless sense of entitlement that we are often accused of. We're taking our time settling down professionally not because we're lazy or noncommittal: In fact, we're just the opposite.