If you still picture entrepreneurs as only suited people in boardrooms with perfect pitch decks and a five-year plan, perhaps you haven’t spoken to any young people lately.
The entrepreneur of today is likely sitting in a sixth form common room, shifting between 3 apps at once, aspiring to start a full fledged business on Instagram.
Though there are jokes about Gen Z having the attention span of a goldfish, recent research presents an entirely different picture. Yes, young people love short form content and spend hours a day on their phones, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all wasted.
A piece by McKinsey & Company stated that although Gen Z is often labelled as having an eight second attention span, the truth is rather that they’ve become selective with what they’ll give their attention to. When something actually interests our youth, they’ll do an old-fashioned internet dive: long form videos, documentaries, podcasts and even books. To our surprise, #BookTok alone has pushed millions of teens back into reading, with young adult fiction sales breaking records with the BookTok hashtag having garnered more than 350 billion views on Tiktok
A Google report also found that Gen Z’s interest in long, analytical content is stronger than ever, take for example the long live-streaming videos any young gamer would spend hours watching. That means the short videos our youth are spending hours mindlessly watching on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok aren’t replacing their attention spans… they are helping them filter through the noise and figure out what’s worth investing their time in.
Could we perhaps then agree that that filtering skill that is fast, sharp, instinctive, could be one of the important entrepreneurial traits a young person nowadays can have?
However, if young people are filtering information faster than ever then we need to rethink how we present entrepreneurship to them. Our job today isn’t to convince our youth to be entrepreneurs, it’s to translate the concept into their language as a set of skills they already use without realising.
And that’s where our responsibility comes in.
Entrepreneurship is becoming a survival skill not because everyone should run a business, but because the world is moving in a direction where adaptability is becoming a non negotiable trait to have.
Recent Deloitte insights add to this reasoning and make things clearer. Young people today aren’t looking for jobs, they’re looking for jobs with meaning.
A majority of Gen Z has highlighted in the report that purpose is central to their satisfaction, and they’re actively seeking work that reflects who they are and what they care about.
Through this approach, Gen Z is constantly reminding us that they want to be part of shaping the world, not just reacting to it.
And perhaps this should be our cue.
If young people are hungry for purpose driven work, then entrepreneurship has to be made even more accessible to them. We were all 16 once, dreaming of changing the world without the skills to know where to start. Well today’s research is telling us exactly what this generation needs: agency, adaptability, and the know how to turn what they care about into something real.
Young people have realised that they are growing up in a world where stability isn’t guaranteed. Jobs that existed five years ago are disappearing. AI is rewriting job descriptions faster than universities can update their syllabus. And we are witnessing first hand whole industries shifting because of one innovative or a new global crisis.
In that kind of world, the real advantage might not be a straight career ladder after all, but the ability to build something from nothing. To problem solve instead of panic and to recognise when something isn’t working and start over without seeing it as failure.
These are the entrepreneurial skills JA Malta aims to teach youth even if they never register a company. They’re the skills that will allow them to navigate uncertainty and create their own opportunities instead of waiting for anyone to hand them one.
