Google, Apple and others were considered the most popular employers for years. But current figures show that things have changed significantly. Where tech companies previously dominated, hospitals and the FBI now stand.
Where do the numbers come from? Every two years, the National Society of High School Scholars surveys its members on how they assess their future career prospects. More than 10,000 people take part in the surveys. The data collected is used each time to create a ranking of the companies that students would most like to work for.
And this year’s figures for 2024 are surprising because popular tech companies like Apple and Microsoft are lagging behind. These companies usually occupy the top spots in the rankings.
Big tech companies lagging far behind for the first time in years
What has the ranking looked like so far? In the last survey (2022), Spotify, Google and Amazon were among the 5 companies most desired by these future members of the labor market. This is what our colleagues at 3Djuegos.com report.
What do the poll results look like? But in 2024, things will look different: All major tech companies, from Google to Microsoft, fall behind the Mayo Clinic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, or the Public Health Service. Even NASA and the FBI rank higher than any other major Silicon Valley company, which hasn’t been the case for years. You can find the entire survey as a PDF file directly at NSHS.org. The current top 10 are (the 2022 ranking in parentheses behind):
Other companies have been hit even harder: Spotify, which had been in the top 5 for years, slipped from 3rd place to 26th place in 2024. And SpaceX from 9th place (2022) to 22nd place.
Why is that? As the company Handshake reports, many young workers at tech companies are not finding what they were promised: they cannot change the world or develop technologies that could improve the future.
What is missing is the passion for the future of technology that these people showed just two years ago.
Instead, they end up working for a listed company that doesn’t hesitate to lay off a large part of its workforce so that it can later say that it continues to grow year after year. And that goes against the ideas of many young people, who show their fear of layoffs and also tend to think differently than their older colleagues.
An expert recently explained why Gen Z’s attitude to work has nothing to do with laziness, but with a different attitude to life. And this also makes it noticeable that many popular tech companies are performing significantly worse: Expert says: Gen Z is not lazy, it has a different expectation of work