How tech disrupted Generation X careers

Members of Generation X were taught in movies that the hero never “sold out” to the system.

For many, the culture was built around this impulse. Movies like The Breakfast Club, bands like The Clash, and even the death of Kurt Cobain all reflected this ethos.

So, that generation’s working life has often been dismaying.

The establishment that Generation X, in its youth, once resisted has largely melted down under the white heat of technological change.

Nowhere is this clearer than in careers where Gen Xers saw their employment paths cut off as companies – or entire industries – were upended by technological change and shifts in the job market.

Felicity Lenehan began a career in journalism in Sydney in the early 1990s. After departing for Europe, email and websites became commonplace. When she returned to Sydney in 2005, she was shocked to find the offices of a print magazine essentially emptied out.

People had moved online. Even as she transitioned to more marketing-focused work, she found that her experience in traditional newsrooms no longer stood out in a job market flooded with bloggers.

Publishers “flattened out the structure” and “put everyone on as freelancers”. So the experienced editors struggled to get work because, as she says, “all of a sudden, everybody could say they were a writer because they had a blog”.

This pitted experienced freelancers against younger writers who would work for “free or cheap”, Lenehan said.

A lot of colleagues “lost their job and couldn’t get work again because of their age”.

Looking back, Lenehan said she would have loved to rise through the ranks of newspapers, and she would have preferred to make a career in it.

But the business model broke down. At the time, she thought the “online space” would thrive alongside print newspapers.

Rather, the internet reshaped the media industry – and continues to.

Part of what makes Generation X’s career journey so dismaying is that when the age set – born roughly from 1961 to 1981 – was growing up, technology and the economy played by more predictable rules. Phone companies controlled telecommunications, media was centralised in broadcast, print and radio, careers were built within strong institutions.

Then came the commercialised internet, then the mobile phone, then social media which placed the viral power of the internet on the iPhone. Each invention was sold as a tool of liberation to the public.

At the same time, the structure of industries — finance, media, marketing, and eventually transportation with ride-share services — became wobbly and contracted.

Not only did certain jobs largely disappear (receptionists, bank tellers, video store clerks) — but whole industries seemingly vanished (electronics repair, video stores).

What had been a marketing job involving pamphlets and print design – requiring an artist’s eye – today frequently centres around SEO and viral videos.

For peers who had been turned out of the industry, copy editors, marketing experts, Lenehan says: “It’s very sad to see people who are hugely passionate about what they do have to close their businesses down.”

“They have found work but it hasn’t quite been the same,” she said.

While Baby Boomers embraced reforms meant to enrich the public while modernising the economy, for Generation X the real-world effect often introduced new insecurity into the workplace.

In Australia, part-time work rose from 11.3 per cent in 1996 to about 32 per cent in 2018, a third of all employees, the McKell Institute reported in 2018, the period bracketing Generation X’s entry into the job market.

While people in creative fields and media have been hard hit by technological change, it’s spread across numerous sectors.

US-based Yuri Bertsch started at a help desk at a tech company in New York, and moved into quality assurance.

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Better technology allowed the company to rationalise the work: “Then half the team was downsized and let go,” he said.

He then spent nine months at another tech company on a help desk “until that was outsourced to Pakistan”.

Bertsch, however, sees the role of Baby Boomers altering regulation as a driver of the disruption for Generation X.

“I feel like we’ve had the paths to prosperity destroyed in our faces at every step by the Boomers since we were teenagers.”

Director for the Centre for the Future Work, Dr Fiona Macdonald, said Generation X “were a generation that had an expectation that you enter the workforce, you develop skills, you had opportunities to move forward”.

The impact of technology, combined with the restructuring of workforces in the past 30 years has hit Generation X particularly hard, breaking the feature of career progression for many people, Macdonald said.

The rupture left them “with nowhere to go or having to go somewhere different if they wanted to get ahead”, according to Macdonald, who added that other generations – younger and older – were “living and working in” these changes too.

That’s not to say Generation X as a whole isn’t more prosperous than Millennials – time has helped increase wealth overall. But Generation X is also more indebted.

According to Morningstar, Generation X holds more gross debt per person ($448,000 as of mid-2024) than any other generation.

Baby Boomers currently have a mere $82,000. Millennials have $410,000.

Perhaps, the most significant difference between Generation X in its youth and the Millennials today is that economic inequality today is no longer a secret.

For Generation X, there was less acknowledgement of the downside of the changes being wrought.

For the then-young Generation X, it was hard to gauge – let alone resist – the growing risks being shifted onto their shoulders.

Judging by the plot line of the Back to the Future trilogy, Generation X was promised hoverboards and, of course, flying cars.

Yet, Generation X’s real-world experience of technology in the workplace hasn’t been simply of possibilities but disruption and adaptation.

The iPhone allows one to work out of hours on the weekend. So do Zoom meetings. For Generation X, “adapt and overcome seems to be our collective creed”, noted one Reddit user.

Another was more succinct: “That is our motto: Adapt or die.”

Today, Felicity Lenehan still works with editorial content but runs a life story services company.

In the course of his career, political scientist Michael de Percy, a Gen Xer, moved from the military, to business, to academia (and soon to journalism).

He was an early hobbyist with personal computers, he said, before he moved on to blogs. De Percy, however, has seen the impact of technological disruption in academia. Today he uses an AI tool for research, which replaces research assistants.

“In about 20 minutes I did at least a year’s worth of research assistant work.

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“Whereas traditionally, I’d be paying a research assistant $50 or $60 an hour plus superannuation,” he said. The subscription access for the research service is about $20 a month.(Academic research assistants being another job on the chopping block.)

In an example of the pace of technological change, a colleague of De Percy’s created a website that could be employed in board meetings in real-time to map out different cost scenarios.

He started that about 10 years ago, hoping it would become a business, De Percy said. Then Elon Musk rolled out his AI tool Grok on social media platform X.

“We were still using [his colleague’s technology] two years ago, and now you wouldn’t bother because of Grok.”

Such an example has made an impression on De Percy.

“I’ve really tried to stay abreast of the technology.”

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