For generations, graduates have been advised to map out their careers: Pick a job, plot the promotions, and know exactly where you want to be in 10 years. But ex-Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg thinks that advice is dangerously outdated.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t script your career when the future is uncertain,\u201d the former chief operating officer of Meta<\/a> just told graduates at Brandeis University. \u201cYou don\u2019t need a 10-year plan. If I had one, I would have missed the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandberg, who went on to become one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, knows firsthand how tempting it is to cling to a rigid plan when the job market looks shaky\u2014as well as what it\u2019s like to enter the working world at a time of huge technological disruption.<\/p>\n Having graduated from Harvard in 1991, the internet as we know it barely existed\u2014the World Wide Web had just been invented and wasn\u2019t released to the public until two years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n After leaving school, she worked at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, but when the administration ended, she struggled to find her next job.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere were days\u2014and I\u2019m not being dramatic\u2014when I thought I would never find one,\u201d she added. \u201cWhen I finally got an offer, I worried that the company might not even survive.\u201d That company was called Google<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s since become one of the world\u2019s most valuable businesses: Today, Google<\/a> has a $4.7 trillion market cap. And Sandberg benefited from being there in the early days, growing its sales team from four people to 4,000, before famously becoming Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s<\/a> right-hand woman. None of it could have been planned. The technology\u2014and the roles it would create\u2014didn\u2019t exist yet.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish someone had told me during those many months of fear, the plan was never the life raft,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The point to Gen Zers is this: In an AI-disrupted job market where the roles today\u2019s graduates are chasing may look completely different (or disappear altogether) within a few years, trying to script their future isn\u2019t just pointless. It could make them miss the very opportunity that changes their life.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need a 10-year plan,\u201d she concluded. \u201cYou need two things: a short-term direction, something to work towards right now, and a long-run dream, a sense of the life you want to build.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t try to connect those two points,\u201d she continued. \u201cThe path is going to surprise you, and the opportunity lies in those surprises.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Sheryl Sandberg tells Gen Z it\u2019s always the worst year to graduate\u2014and she has proof\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg\u2019s advice lands at a particularly anxious moment for young workers. Gen Z graduates are entering a labor market just as it\u2019s being completely overhauled by AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n From OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman to Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei, tech leaders keep sounding the alarm entire professions could soon be wiped out by AI<\/a>. The World Economic Forum warned in January 2025 nearly half of bosses worldwide<\/a> plan to fire and replace their workers with bots in the next four years. And entry-level workers are apparently first on the firing line.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg acknowledged that fear. <\/p>\n \u201cI know many of you are rightly worried about what comes next,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019ve seen the headlines: This year\u2019s graduates face the toughest job market in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n But she also emphasized to the bright young minds of tomorrow that this is nothing new. And she brought the receipts to prove it.<\/p>\n \u201cLet me read some other headlines: This year\u2019s college class faces a daunting task, finding jobs in the worst economy since the Great Depression\u2014that was 2003,\u201d Sandberg said. \u201cHopes for an easy job search have fizzled as graduates enter the weakest market in decades\u20142009.\u201d She read out old headlines about graduates entering the worst job market dating back to 1971.<\/p>\n \u201cDeclaring this particular year the worst is a tradition almost as old as graduation itself,\u201d she added. \u201cI\u2019m not telling you the job market is easy, but every generation has figured it out.\u201d<\/p>\n CEOs agree Gen Z should ditch the five-year plan\u00a0<\/p>\n Sandberg is far from the only powerful voice telling workers to loosen their grip on the five-year plan. Ryan Roslansky, the executive vice president of LinkedIn<\/a> and Microsoft<\/a> Office, recently called it \u201coutdated<\/a>\u201d given how much AI could change the workplace.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn reality, when you know technology and the labor market and everything is moving beneath you, I think having a five-year plan is a little bit foolish,\u201d Roslansky said on a No One Knows What They\u2019re Doing podcast episode.<\/p>\n