Gen Z is not quitting • They are recalculating

A young man I will call Kojo finished a respectable degree from a Ghanaian public university, served his year at the National Service Scheme, and landed what every aunty in the family agreed was a "real job" — a junior officer role at a commercial bank in Accra. Eighteen months in, he resigned. 

No new job lined up. No scholarship abroad confirmed. He moved back to his mother's house in Kasoa, set up a ring light in his bedroom, and started posting financial-literacy explainer videos on TikTok in Twi and English.

The family verdict came quickly. He had "wasted his degree." He had been "spoiled by social media." He needed to "be serious." A senior uncle — the kind who still keeps his National Service ID card in his wallet thirty years later — told him plainly that no woman would marry a man who sits at home filming himself.

Six months later, Kojo had eleven thousand followers, two small brand deals with a mobile money agent and a hair-product line, and a freelance contract producing short-form content for a fintech start-up.

His monthly take-home, in a good month, was already higher than the bank salary he had walked away from. He is not rich. He is not famous. He has no pension, no medical scheme, no employer-provided anything.

But he is calmer than he had been in years, he sleeps well, and — most importantly to him — he believes his work matters.

Kojo is not unusual. Variations of his story are unfolding in Tema, in Kumasi, in Takoradi, in Sunyani, in Ho. They are unfolding in the WhatsApp groups of friends who quietly compare salaries and rent figures.

They are unfolding in the unspoken decisions of young accountants who stop sending CVs to the Big Four and start studying for the Canadian Express Entry pool.

They are unfolding in the bedrooms of National Service personnel who, three months in, realise that the path their elders walked is a path that no longer leads where it used to.

Consider, alongside Kojo, the young woman I will call Akua — first-class graduate, called to the bar two years ago, eighteen months in chambers, now studying for the New York bar exam in the evenings while running an Instagram page that helps law students prepare for entrance examinations.

Or the National Service teacher in the Volta Region who teaches Mathematics by day and edits podcasts for two Accra-based brands by night, earning more from the podcast work than from his official posting.

Or the medical officer-in-waiting at Korle Bu who is quietly preparing the documents for the United Kingdom's Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board exam — not because she does not love medicine, but because she has done the calculation and the calculation has spoken.

As an HR consultant who has spent the better part of two decades watching the Ghanaian workplace evolve, I want to say something plainly to readers — and to a generation that has, frankly, been miscast in our national conversation.

Gen Z is not quitting. They are recalculating.

The distinction matters more than most employers, parents, and pastors in this country yet realise.

II. The misdiagnosis

We have, in the Ghanaian media and around our dinner tables, settled on a comfortable narrative about young people. The narrative goes like this: they are lazy. They are entitled.

They cannot endure suffering the way "we" did. They want everything now. They have been ruined by TikTok, Netflix, and the soft logic of foreign HR podcasts.

They quit jobs at the first inconvenience. They cannot tolerate correction. They want money without work.

It is a comfortable narrative because it requires nothing of us. If the problem is that young people have weak character, then the older generation can simply shake its head, sip its tea, and wait for them to "grow up."

 Nothing in the economy needs to change. Nothing in the way we run our companies needs to change.

Nothing in the way we structure our schools, our pensions, our promotion ladders, or our family expectations needs to change. The young people are the problem. Case closed.

The narrative is comfortable. It is also wrong.

What we are watching in Ghana — and across most of the world — is not a generation of quitters. It is a generation of recalculators. The arithmetic that worked for their parents has stopped working.

They are sitting down with a pen, a payslip, a rent advert, an exchange-rate notification on their phone, and the WhatsApp status of a cousin who japa'd to Canada, and they are doing the maths. And the maths is telling them something their parents' maths never told them: the old equation is broken.

To "quit" implies giving up. To "recalculate" implies re-examining the inputs, the assumptions, the expected return — and choosing a different path because the old path no longer adds up. The first is a failure of character. The second is a function of arithmetic.

If we as a country continue to treat recalculation as quitting, we will keep designing the wrong policies, building the wrong workplaces, and giving the wrong advice.

We will keep losing our most ambitious young people not because they are weak, but because we have refused to listen to what their behaviour is telling us.

What follows is an attempt to take the recalculation seriously.

The math

Let me start with the numbers, because this is, at heart, a numbers story.

The Ghana Statistical Service's labour-force data for 2025 paints a sobering portrait. Youth unemployment for persons aged 15 to 24 averaged 32.5 per cent across the second and third quarters of the year.

In Greater Accra — the supposed engine of opportunity — that figure climbed to a staggering 49.3 per cent in the third quarter.

About 1.34 million young Ghanaians aged 15 to 24 are classified as NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. That is a city the size of Kumasi, sitting idle.

Among those who do find work, the picture is not as comforting as the headlines suggest. The same data shows that overall employment grew by 330,000 jobs between Q1 and Q3 of 2025.

But the bulk of that growth was absorbed by vulnerable, informal, low-productivity work. The economy grew. The good jobs did not.

For tertiary graduates — the very young people who were promised that education would be the great equaliser — the picture is bleaker still.

Recent analyses suggest that only about one in ten Ghanaian graduates secures formal employment within a year of leaving university.

Of those who experienced a prolonged spell of unemployment between January 2022 and September 2023, more than one in five were tertiary-qualified. Holding a degree in 2026 is no longer a passport. It is, at best, a probationary visa.

Now, stack that against the cost of staying alive.

The average monthly salary in Ghana hovers around GH¢2,579, roughly US$ 210 at recent exchange rates. A one-bedroom apartment in central Accra — Osu, East Legon, Cantonments — rents between GHS¢3,000 and GH¢4,500 per month.

Even the more "affordable" areas — Madina, Adenta, Tema — sit between GHS¢1,200 and GHS¢2,000. Add electricity bills that can run to GH¢600 a month with air-conditioning, water, internet, transport, food, and the small social obligations that no Ghanaian can decline without consequence — funeral contributions, naming-ceremony envelopes, sibling school fees — and the arithmetic produces a single, unavoidable conclusion.

For a meaningful share of young Ghanaian workers, the average formal-sector salary is not enough to rent the smallest dignified room in the city where the job is. Not enough. Full stop.

This is not a generational grievance. It is a structural fact. When the formal-sector wage does not cover the formal-sector cost of living, the formal sector itself becomes an irrational destination.

A young person who looks at that equation and decides to chase something else — a side hustle, a content platform, a visa application, a small business — is not being lazy. They are responding rationally to incentives we ourselves have set up. They are recalculating.

Globally, the most repeated complaint about Gen Z workers is that they will not stay. The numbers, on first inspection, support the complaint.

Recent research from Randstad and other large workforce studies pegs the average tenure of a Gen Z worker in the first five years of their career at just 1.1 years — significantly shorter than the 1.8 years for Millennials, 2.8 for Gen X, and 2.9 for Baby Boomers. Roughly 54 per cent of Gen Z workers report that they regularly browse job platforms for their next role, even while employed.

It is easy, looking at those figures, to conclude that this is a disloyal generation that cannot commit. But that is not what the research actually shows.

The same studies that document the short tenure also document the reasons. Gen Z workers leave jobs primarily because of unmet growth expectations — they cannot see the next step, the learning curve has flattened, the promised mentorship never materialised, the promotion that was dangled in the interview has been quietly forgotten.

Importantly, about 68 per cent of Gen Z workers say they still strive to perform effectively in their current role. They are not coasting. They are not sabotaging. They are working hard — and quietly preparing to leave, because they have learned that loyalty, in their experience, is rarely reciprocated.

In Ghana, the picture is shaped further by realities that the global research does not capture. Many young Ghanaians enter the formal workforce through National Service or junior roles in which the salary is, frankly, symbolic.

They are told, often by HR managers, that they should "be patient," that "loyalty will be rewarded," that "the company has plans for them." Then they watch a cousin who entered the same year at a competitor get poached and tripled in salary.

They watch a senior who has been "loyal" for fifteen years still negotiate hard for a basic increment. They watch the same promotion announcement go to the manager's church-mate. They draw conclusions. They update their CVs.

In a labour market where employers cannot or will not pay a living wage, where promotion ladders are opaque, where the relationship between performance and reward is loose at best, short tenure is not disloyalty.

It is the only sane strategy a young worker has for compounding their income at the speed required by inflation.

The older generation calls this "job-hopping." Gen Z, more accurately, calls it "growth-hunting." Both terms describe the same behaviour, but only one of the two respects the person doing it.