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Olivia has had enough. On paper, the 28-year-old has an enviable job: sales co-ordinator at a London auction house. She handles priceless artefacts every day, meets interesting clients and gets a front-row view of the art world.
However, auctioneering has lost its sheen for the humanities graduate, who asked to remain anonymous. Several years into her career, Olivia earns less than £30,000. Living and renting in London eats up most of her salary. “I can survive, but I’m not saving,” she said. “The longer I’m in the industry, it’s more of a concern.”
The hours are brutal, too. In the lead-up to auctions, it is not unusual to work into the night. “My record was 9am to 2am,” she said. “You hear stories of people sleeping in the office.” Now she is on the brink of quitting. “If things don’t change in the next six months, I’m changing careers,” she said. “I just want to work a nine-to-five and go home.”
Olivia is not alone. For many young people, the prospect of a career in prestigious, but poorly paid, sectors has lost its appeal. Instead of their former dream jobs, they want stability, work-life balance, and higher pay. Many are finding this in technology.
Software development in particular has become a popular destination for young career-switchers. The mobility of the sector means flexible working is common. Another attraction is the wealth of training on offer, much of it free. Coding “boot camps” offer intensive training over a few months, often with no experience required.
It is part of a seismic shift with workers of all ages giving up on “living to work”. A global poll of 26,000 workers by Randstad, the recruiter, found that work-life balance had overtaken pay as the leading motivator for workers of all ages for the first time in the survey’s 22-year history. Among British respondents, significantly more Generation Z and millennials reported quitting jobs because they did not fit in with their personal lives, than their Generation X or boomer peers.
Daniela, who asked for her surname not to be included, switched to tech after becoming frustrated with the low salary and long hours of a junior architect. “Architecture has this glamorous feel,” said the 35-year-old. But at top-ranking practices, “because it’s so prestigious to have their name on your CV, the pay is low”. When she quit after four years in the industry, Daniela earned less than £30,000, and knew colleagues with a decade’s experience on under £40,000.
“It was not easy to decide to quit, especially because I had invested so much time and money in my degree, but I thought: I can’t do this for the rest of my working life.”
Armed with some basic coding knowledge, she won a place on a three-month boot camp in 2023. The provider, TechSwitch, runs free courses and recoups the cost by finding industry placements for some graduates, whose employers then foot the bill. Daniela is now working as a software engineer at a tech consultancy. She writes code, fixes bugs and creates apps. Even on an entry-level tech salary, she is earning more than she did in architecture.
Stability was a key motivator for a fellow boot camp alumna, Claudia Giancola, who spent four years working as an animation editor. She worked on projects for clients including Netflix and Warner Brothers, but found the precarious nature of short-term contracts unsustainable.
“I loved the industry, and I was one of the lucky ones who always had a job, but I still felt that economic pressure,” she said. Planning for her future also played a part: “I really want to have children,” she added. “If I had to work only for myself, I could risk it; if I had a child, I wouldn’t want to.”
Giancola, 29, is now a software developer at TechSwitch’s parent company, Softwire. Her earnings in animation fluctuated between £32,000 and £40,000 a year, she now earns £42,000. Five months into the job, the transition has been relatively smooth. “Coding is similar to editing,” she said. “Even though it’s not storytelling, it’s connected to communication and problem solving. I thought coding was a technical, objective thing, but it’s fascinating to see how every person approaches it in a very different way.”
While a desire for less intensive work conditions is not unique to younger workers, the economic background to their careers, high inflation and stagnant growth, is.
“Back when our parents’ parents’ generation created the idea of these prestigious roles, you would go in at quite a low-paid salary, work your way up, and eventually you get a wonderful salary,” said Molly Johnson-Jones, founder of the recruitment firm Flexa. “That just doesn’t exist in this economy.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that many younger workers are shifting away from high-pressure jobs and towards stable work that gives them space, and money, to live comfortably.
“Young people are so squeezed financially,” said Johnson-Jones, 32, whose company lets jobseekers filter roles based on flexible working or benefits. “There’s still an emphasis on trying to get the best salary you can, but there is less of a desire to work yourself into the ground if there’s no guarantee of progression, promotion or pay rises.”
This was the case for Hannah van den Wijngaard, an art history graduate. Over seven years, she worked at two London galleries, as an archivist and rights manager. Van den Wijngaard, 35, initially loved the work but lack of opportunities to progress left her with a feeling of “stagnation”, she said.
Art bosses told Hannah van den Wijngaard: “We don’t have to pay you more, because so many people want to get in”
Salary was also a huge frustration. Van den Wijngaard summarises the art world’s “cut-throat” attitude by recalling an HR colleague’s response to a requested pay rise. “They told me: ‘We don’t have to pay you more, because so many people want to get into the sector. So if you don’t want this job, that’s fine’,” she recalled.
By the time van den Wijngaard resigned in 2021, she was earning just under £35,000. Three years into a career as a software developer, she has doubled that.
The pandemic was a catalyst: with galleries shut, her employer hired developers to build an online exhibition platform. Watching them work, van den Wijngaard was hooked. She won a place on a coding boot camp with Makers Academy, then a software engineering apprenticeship. She is now a software developer for Eurostar.
While van den Wijngaard misses “the buzz of an exhibition opening”, she is happy with the autonomy she now has at work. “In tech, they put a lot of trust in you from the beginning. In galleries, I had to prove myself again and again.” The pay bump has provided “breathing space”. Van den Wijngaard retrained at a time when there was particular demand for software developers, but rounds of redundancies in Silicon Valley and beyond, plus the rapid growth of AI, means hiring has since weakened.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that AI will reach the capabilities of a “mid-level” software engineer this year. “Over time, we’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps, including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers,” he said at the start of this year.
However, the Meta founder added it was “too early to know” the exact impact AI would have on jobs, suggesting it could “augment” human developers and allow them to be more creative. Van den Wijngaard remains optimistic. “I feel like I’m in a good position, because even if my job is automated away, I could be the one controlling the machine in future,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be an AI prompt engineer one day.”