How did you choose your profession? Your job?
How did you get to where you are today?
Really, how?
Did you choose between risk and safety?
Were you pushed by your parents?
Are you scared of unemployment?
What choice did you make?
Because we all make choices.
We start when we’re very young,
and get asked: “Would you rather eat a spoon of maggots a day,
or a tarantula a month?”
That doesn’t have a huge impact, but these are your first choices.
When we get to seventh grade:
Spanish or German?
Then in ninth grade: a vocational course, an academic course, or maybe other routes.
We get to 18 and have to choose our career path,
when we’re not even old enough to drink a beer in the US.
But how did you know that you made the right choice?
Did you already know that you’d made the right choice?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, I really ask myself them.
I’m 21 and doing a masters in finance,
and I’m a little scared that I was wrong.
Do you remember your childhood dreams? What did you dream of becoming?
A schoolteacher, a cashier, an astronaut?
When I was young I dreamed of being Jamy.
You know, Jamy from “C’est pas sorcier” on France 3?
I used to love that.
About science that needed to be passed on. I thought that was great.
Today, I’m doing a masters in finance.
I wonder what happened to me?
I think to myself: “Will you stay in finance?”
And in the end, I tell myself : “Maybe not forever.”
Is it really that serious to be wrong, after all?
I turned to my parents, my colleagues, my close friends, to teachers,
and I said to them: “Well, what am I doing?”
Seriously, what am I doing? After my studies, what am I doing?
In the end, there were as many answers as people asked.
I was told: “Be a trader for ten years and relax in the sun afterwards.”
“Work in finance, maybe you’ll like it.”
“Set up a business.” “Change your degree.”
I got all sorts of answers.
The most interesting thing wasn’t what I’d said,
because frankly, I know nothing about it,
but what people replied,
and how much their generation was influencing their response.
And I say their generation, and not their age,
because a 20 year old and a 50 year old
don’t have the same professional ambitions.
Their generation.
I was born in 1995, making me a member of Generation Z.
Do you know Generation Z?
It’s the generation born after 1994,
children of a society undergoing profound change,
who find themselves today in the midst of all this technology.
They are the latest update of the human race
with a new organ transplant that you know:
the smartphone.
You all have one, I imagine.
This cerebral bullet train that goes from eye to thumb,
has changed everything.
Because nowadays,
if at 3AM I want to know what Chinese pandas eat,
well, ladies and gentlemen, I can find out.
That may not change anything for you,
but it has changed everything.
It was Google in elementary school, MSN in middle school,
Facebook in high school,
and today, Instagram, Pinterest, and so on.
But is this generation well received?
So, imagine that last night I was reading an article on the train,
a Point article,
and there was such a sweet portrait of my generation.
Narcissistic social network addicts, high on 4G, drunk on WiFi,
full of themselves, clearly,
in short, magnificent and kind people.
But is this generation really terrible?
And yet we’re going to have to collaborate, you and I.
We’ll have to work together.
Because today there are three generations in the job market.
One: the baby boomers.
Born between 1950 and 1965.
They enjoyed a boom in employment.
They are more attracted by hierarchy, by structure.
Next, we have Gen X: born between 1965 and 1980.
They’re the opposite.
Jobs weren’t particularly good, they had to persevere, to work hard.
And then, Gen Y.
Gen Y is those born between 1980 and 1995.
They saw their parents slave away at work.
They saw them be fired
after years of dedicated work.
That’s when they said:
“Stop, I don’t want that.
I will be in charge of my own life.”
So, you can imagine the bosses from Generation X
and the young people from Generation Y,
that’s not going to work.
And there, the miracle of Gen Z comes along.
It’s already difficult to manage Gen Y’s dreams,
now we have to stamp out Gen Z,
children of mother technology,
brought up on Google, Facebook, Instagram,
who go out chasing Pokémon.
Brilliant, we love it.
But in fact, the Zs are rather more simple.
What do they want at work, this generation ?
Studies show that 50% want to be an entrepreneur. That’s great.
But you and me,
we know very well that 50% of my generation won’t do that,
won’t set up a business.
Well, what does it mean for a young person starting out?
For a young person, it means carving a place for themselves.
It’s still a very vague concept.
It’s saying: “I have knowledge, I have skills,
and I’m going to put them to use in a business,
and in exchange, the business will give me their knowledge.”
A mutual sharing of knowledge.
And that’s when Gen Z think: “Like Y, I want to be in charge of my life,
but better still, I want to be in charge of my knowledge.
I will learn from the business, from my degree,
but equally from myself.”
Because with new technology today,
you have online classes, all sorts of things
where you can get a degree from Harvard or l’École Polytechnique,
by spending a few hours a week on the internet.
And that changes everything.
So, today, wouldn’t taking action be aspiring to really know these subjects
in order to master them better and to be innovative ?
So, are we really that different, us, Xs, Ys, and Zs,
the baby boomers and soon the Alphas.
You’re all looking at me like I’m a little too idealistic.
It’s an idealistic draft.
Is my generation a generation of idealists,
of dreamers, out of touch with reality?
I was born in 1995, so, like I said, I’m a part of Generation Z.
My little sister was an economic crisis.
I never knew the baguette at three francs.
I saw more cabinet reshuffles
than presidents of France.
I have more faith in the Loch Ness monster than in retirement at 60.
And at school, I unfortunately learned,
our planet is doomed, the final deadline being 2050.
I don’t think that Generation Z is an ungrateful generation,
spoiled rotten with a smartphone in its mouth.
I don’t think that we’re so different.
We are different because we have unequal life circumstances.
When my grandfather was 13,
he saw the end of the Second World War.
When my father was 13,
he saw the first oil crises which ended 30 years of economic growth.
When I was 13, it was the start of the economic crisis.
So, are we really that different?
I am not a member of Generation Z. No.
I am a member of society Z.
A society which you have passed down to us with the challenges that went with it.
I am a member of a society in perpetual evolution.
I am from a composite generation,
made of baby boomers, who taught us work,
of Gen X, who taught us perseverance,
of Gen Y, who taught us to bring out the individual and not the worker.
I am many generations.
I am you.
So, finally,
can we work together and are we our degree?
Am I my degree, am I a financier?
No, I don’t think so.
I think we are much more than that today, and that we can pass on even more still.
Now, perhaps when you see a young person stuck to their phone,
you’ll say to yourself: “I was the same, but in a different way.”
As for me, I’m going to continue to take an interest in politics
in the economy, in cooking, in astrology, in science,
in whatever I want, in fact,
because I won’t have to choose my degree.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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