Forget work-life balance: Gen Z say their top priority is actually career growth, with 93% aspiring for the C-suite
Fortune Preston Fore
Gen Z interns at KPMG say career growth beats work-life balance, with 93% eyeing the C-suite someday. They're also wary AI could rot their critical thinking if they lean on it too hard.
Turns out the generation raised on smartphones and TikTok isn't chasing chill jobs and quiet quitting after all. A new KPMG survey of over 900 summer interns found career growth topped their list of priorities when picking a full-time employer, beating out work-life balance, pay, culture, and even staying current with tech. And 93% of them said they want to reach senior executive or C-suite roles eventually. That's not a modest ambition given how brutal entry-level hiring has gotten.
The twist is why they're so focused on climbing. KPMG's Derek Thomas put it bluntly: interns are worried that if they let AI do all their early thinking for them, they'll never build the instincts that make someone worth promoting. So instead of treating AI as a shortcut, many are treating hands-on grunt work as reps they need to protect. Critical thinking ranked as the skill interns believe will separate winners from losers over the next five years, and more than four in ten said their biggest fear is that leaning too hard on AI will dull their judgment.
That's a fairly sophisticated read on the moment, especially from a cohort often dismissed as the most AI-dependent generation yet. Seventy-six percent said long-term success will require both strong human skills and the ability to direct AI agents well, not one or the other. It's less about avoiding the technology and more about not letting it replace the muscle memory that turns a junior hire into someone a firm wants to invest in.
The money at the top helps explain the hustle. KPMG partners in the UK pulled in roughly £880,000, about $1.2 million, in fiscal 2025, up 11% from the year before. S&P 500 CEOs averaged $18.9 million in 2024. Executives from Jamie Dimon to Amazon's Andy Jassy to KIND founder Daniel Lubetzky have all been pushing the same line lately: AI can write your email, but it can't ask a sharp question, read a room, or figure out why a project is actually stuck. Gen Z, it seems, is listening closely enough to build a strategy around it.
My take
Good on them for noticing something a lot of executives still haven't fully absorbed: outsourcing your thinking to a chatbot early in your career is a fast way to become replaceable by that same chatbot. The C-suite obsession is a bit much, and not everyone can be a partner making seven figures, but the instinct to guard critical thinking as a scarce skill is exactly right, and it's a healthier response to AI hype than most boardrooms have managed.
Read more about this at: Fortune
