No hot takes without receipts: our NextGen research methods and sources

Where the numbers come from

No hot takes without receipts.

There's no shortage of opinions about young talent at work. Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes, you'll find ten. There’s no shortage of opinions. There’s a shortage of hard data, and a habit of picking one side of the conversation.

This hub is built on NextGen Intelligence, sourced from our research. That's what “receipts” means here: claims you can trace, numbers you can check, sources we'll name. The gut gets it wrong sometimes. Receipts don't.

How we use them triangulation, plainly

The loudest voices in any "Gen Z at work" conversation are rarely representative; and they're almost always telling half the story and calling it the whole one.

That's the gap we built this hub to close. We run quantitative surveys on both sides, Gen Z and employers, in the same period, so we can measure the gap directly instead of inferring it. Qualitative interviews then explain the why behind the patterns we see in the numbers. Our in-house panel reality-checks the framing on the themes we run by them. And thirty years of NextGen talent pool data gives every interpretation context that a survey alone can't see.

When our intuition points one way and the data points another, the data wins.

Young man looking through a looking glass.

The four methods

Method 01 · Quantitative surveys

Large-scale, statistically tested surveys with independent research partners. We run them with young professionals and with organisations, in the same period, so the two sides can be compared directly. Topics shift wave to wave, but the discipline is constant: enough respondents to find the pattern, the right questions to make the comparison meaningful.

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Employer POV

NextGen Report

A quantitative survey of HR leads, L&D managers and line managers across Belgian and Dutch organisations, run by Ormit Talent in collaboration with research partner MarktEffect. Captures how employers talk about young talent, the clichés they still repeat, and the admissions they make in the same breath.

SCOPE: 573 employers · BE + NL · FOCUS: Employer POV · WAVE: 2024–2025

READ THE FULL REPORT

Gen Z POV

iVOX young talent panel

Representative survey of working Gen Z in Belgium and the Netherlands, run by Ormit Talent in partnership with iVOX and D'Ieteren. What young professionals actually want, expect and experience. Not what employers think they want.

SCOPE: 1695 Gen Z respondents · BE + NL · METHOD: Quant panel · FOCUS: Gen Z POV · WAVE: 2021

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT (BE ONLY)

Method 02 · Qualitative interviews

Surveys answer what. Interviews answer why. We sit down with young professionals and their direct managers in the same company context, across Europe, and analyse the conversations using our own NLP sentiment technology. Hesitation, contradiction, the gap between what someone tells their manager and what they tell an interviewer the day after: that's where the real insight sits.

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Multi-role

In-depth interviews · young pros and managers

In-depth qualitative interviews with young professionals and their direct managers, captured in the same company context across Europe. Conversations are translated and processed for sentiment, coverage and consistency.

SCOPE: Conversations across Europe · METHOD: NLP-analysed interviews ·

IN PROGRESS

First-job study · young professionals (in the field)

A qualitative study of young professionals in their very first job, currently being rolled out. The results aren't in yet; this card holds the spot so the findings can slot straight in once fieldwork wraps.

STATUS: Fieldwork underway · FOCUS: First-job experience · WAVE: Expected 2026

Method 03 · NextGen Panel — our Ormitters

Young professionals currently in our programmes who react to our themes and challenge our assumptions when we run things by them. Not external respondents we paid to fill in a form but people we coach every day, who tell us when our framing misses the mark. That proximity isn't a bug. It's the thing that keeps everything else honest.

IN-HOUSE

NextGen Talent panel

Active NextGen Talents in Ormit Talent programmes who give their point of view on the topics we run by them. That’s how we are able to create a nuanced picture at the intersection.

Method 04 · Field observations
from 30 years inside the work

We've been at the intersection of young talent and the organisations they join for thirty years. That isn't a dataset in the traditional sense. It's a living feedback loop: what organisations promise during onboarding versus what actually lands three months in. We don't publish this as statistics. We use it to ground every interpretation we make.

IN-HOUSE

Ormit Talent trainee cohort data

Thirty years of running traineeships with thousands of young professionals across sectors. Not publishable as statistics — but the texture and pattern recognition that shape this hub.

SCALE: 30 years

What makes this different

Both sides of the contract.
Most NextGen research picks a perspective. We don't. We measure the same themes from young talent and employers in the same period. The findings live where the two contradict each other.

Sentiment, not just scores.
NLP analysis across in-depth conversations surfaces what surveys miss: hesitation, contradiction, and the gap between what someone says and what they mean.

Built in the work, not beside it.
Our insights come from years of direct work with young talent. We don't just study the question. We work in it, every day. And where our proximity might create bias, the data is there to correct us.

Jonge vrouw met een gele zonnebril, verrast

Who's behind this

This hub is built by Ormit Talent. Experts in NextGen at Work.

For thirty years we've been at the intersection of young talent and the organisations they join; coaching the talent, equipping the managers, watching both sides try to make it work and often miss each other in exactly the same way. We don't pick sides. We make the gap visible. Then smaller.

Whether you run a team, hire, or are at the start of your own career: this hub is for you.

The dataroom