How To Get The Right Job?

Welcome to a working world that doesn’t understand you, might not want to hire you, and definitely doesn’t want to pay you very much. Still, there’s hope for the rising group of idealistic and tech-savvy young workers. Here, our best advice on how to get the right job—and crush it.

- Claire Groden

There are a lot of different kinds of cakes that you can make in a mug. That’s the key takeaway of the cooking blog hosted by Lana Lingbo Li, a millennial who burnt out on Burning Man, freelance web design, and world travel, then settled down to fulfil a passion: a website primarily dedicated to the sheer variety of mug-size confections that young, lazy singles can bake in their microwaves. By day the Harvard grad has a full-time job at a Boston startup, but Li couldn’t imagine herself on a typical corporate trajectory. “I’m doing better than most people my age, and I’ve had an interesting life,” she says. “I do feel like I’ve really drunk the millennial Kool-Aid.” Just what is the millennial Kool-Aid? All we really know is that corporate America is about to be chugging it. In 2015 the generation surpassed Gen X to become the largest in the workforce. Though misconceptions abound, the economy’s youngest workers really are different: They’re accustomed to the swipe, refresh of constant notifications, the steady ping of chat messages, and the reassuring weight of a smartphone on their person at all times. They’re principled—and statistically less likely to pursue a job they hate just for the money. And for all their supposed entitlement, they ventured out from the nest during one of the greatest economic recessions of our time, a fact that still weighs on their paycheques.