The NextGen Hub / Vol. 01 / The Loyalty Contract
Driver 02 of 03
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Driver 02 of 03
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A manager can make today workable. Only visible growth makes tomorrow worth staying for.
the organisation half:
"She's only just got here. Everything's still new. Opening the growth talk now reads as impatient, like she wants to run before she can walk." — Team lead, mid-career
the Gen Z half:
"I told them in the interview I wanted to grow. Six months in, no one's asked me back about it. I don't know if it's still on the table." — Young professional, mid-twenties
Both quotes are accurate. The talent reads the same six months as stalling; the manager reads it as settling in. The manager isn't tired of the question. He's wary of the label impatient, which nobody says out loud and which lands anyway.
The cost surfaces too late to act on, and both sides feel it. The eleven-point development gap that shows up in who leaves has a mirror on the employer side: in the NextGen Report, 35% name early departure as their #1 challenge with young talent, and 31% name expectations of rapid growth that clash with reality, rising to 52% among Ormit Talent clients, who work with more ambitious profiles. Same problem, same survey, two languages. Both sides are still surprised when the resignation lands.
The move that surfaces this early is one fifteen-minute conversation around month four: what does good look like over the next twelve months, what does more look like over twenty-four, and which of those depends on the talent and which on the company. Almost nobody schedules it: the organisation because the process isn't built around it, the talent because it might read as I want a promotion already.
If both sides want the same thing, then intent was never the problem. The conversation that would prove it just never happens. And to see where it breaks, you first have to know what Gen Z is actually looking for.
One word keeps surfacing on Gen Z's career feeds: careermaxxing: being as deliberate about your career curve as about your skills or your health. The point is less about climbing fast than about moving where you can see it: clear criteria, internal mobility, a horizon you can point at. It reads like a passing trend.
Our NextGen survey finds the same reflex underneath:
65%
want to stay with their current employer as long as possible
3 in 5
want to grow
30%
weren't sure what they wanted after their studies
Three questions, three answers. We asked Gen Z separately whether they want to stay, whether they want to grow, and how clear their plans were after studying. Each number is the share who agreed, out of everyone asked.
The 65% keeps getting undersold. This generation isn't restless; the loyalty holds as long as they can see, from where they stand, that the road continues. What looks like job-hopping is recalibrating the route when that view goes dark. And growth here isn't only climbing. It's discovering what they're good at, being guided while they do it, and seeing the work actually land somewhere. All of that counts as much as a title.
Careermaxxing
Our research shows that young people prefer job security over career security. 3 out of 5 surveyed young talents want to advance in their careers, either vertically or horizontally. Having a stable job allows them to take on new projects, discover new skills, and take risks to grow professionally. So careermaxing for Gen Z isn't necessarily synonymous with job hopping.
The trend on the feed and the figures in this report describe the same thing.
ShareSo the ask is concrete. The real question is how two reasonable sides keep missing each other on something this clear.
If one image holds this focus together, it's this: organisations draw the map. Gen Z reads it, then marks it up.
And both sides misread it, in opposite directions, off the same clock. The organisation reads steady performance as they're fine, silence as confidence. It isn't; people stay quiet long after they've stopped feeling oriented. The talent reads an early plateau as a dead end, slowness as a verdict. It usually isn't that either.
This is where development and growth split apart. Growth isn't development; development is one of the things you spend on it. A training catalogue is a menu: pick a course, take it, log it, move on. A path is a route: each step compounds, month eighteen looks bigger than month six, and someone in the building owns whether the steps still connect. Most organisations built the menu. Far fewer built the route.
"It's really hard to know what your options are within the company, apart from looking at your direct line of work upwards."
The difference never makes the same dashboard. Training budgets get reported quarterly to the people who sign them off. Whether anyone actually experienced the feeling of being developed surfaces in attrition numbers nine months later, when the budget's spent and the next offer's accepted. Below: the four places where the map breaks down. Two are the organisation's to fix, one belongs to the talent, and the last belongs to both.
Development without a destination is a budget line. Development with a destination is retention.
If the future isn't visible,
the present starts to feel
temporary.
Our European employer interviews surface the same pattern: little transparency about which paths exist or how to reach them. Mobility runs on informal networks, so anyone without one stands outside the conversation. Call these phantom paths: routes on the careers page that don't exist in anyone's near future.
1 in 4 young professionals say their manager doesn't meaningfully contribute to their growth
Horizontal moves (other team, other function, rotation) live in HR decks and rarely reach the 1:1
The classic ladder fits badly: many of this generation want autonomy and real impact, and plenty don't want to manage anyone. When the only way up runs through line management, half the ambition has nowhere to go.
The other half of this is the talent's. Name a direction early and a trajectory gets built around you; wait to be noticed and you stay a guess. The organisation can fix the map. The talent can ask for the legend. Neither happens by default, and the silence costs more than the ask.
Training has the budget. Growth doesn't have the feeling.
Organisations already know this. They say so in their own survey. When asked to grade themselves, the number of people that rate their organisation a 7 or higher:
40%
say they have increased internal growth opportunities.
Two questions, one chart. We asked employers to grade their own organisation on each talent challenge, on a scale of 1 to 10. The percentages in the half-circles are the share who gave a 7 or higher, and the averages next to them come from that same question. The 40% comes from a separate question about what they'd actually done about it, so that one is an action, not a grade. We put them side by side on purpose.
Source : NextGen Report by Ormit Talent · 573 employers across BE & NL, 2024-25
"Opportunities for advancement are limited. The primary and secondary employment conditions are extremely good. Retaining talent is difficult due to limited growth potential."
"Doorgroeimogelijkheden zijn beperkt. Primaire en secundaire voorwaarden zijn extreem goed. Behoud van talent is lastig door beperkte groeipotentie."
No outsider is making this case. The highest self-score is sitting right next to the lowest, on the same form. The reason it's hard to fix is that the symptom looks cultural (disengagement, mid-tenure malaise) while the cause is much more practical. Who owns the development path of a 26-year-old?
In most companies, ownership is split across HR, business leads, managers, and budgets. This means every person in the chain can reasonably point to someone else. Until one name is on it, every department agrees it matters, and no department moves. Neither Gen Z effort nor training budget closes it alone.
Step back, and the scorecard says something simpler: Gen Z is the stress test for how well an organisation has built a framework for development.
"If ownership for growth remains stuck between leadership, managers, and HR, it often ends up belonging to no one. Organisations that take talent development seriously need to explicitly take the lead on employees' progression."
"Als eigenaarschap voor groei tussen directie, managers en HR blijft liggen, is het vaak van niemand. Organisaties die talentontwikkeling serieus nemen, moeten expliciet regie pakken op de doorgroei van medewerkers."
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