The Ladder Nobody Wants to Climb: Generational Change in Kenya and Belgium

🇰🇪 Kenya · 🇧🇪 Belgium

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Belgium, only 8 percent of Gen Z employees say climbing the corporate ladder is their main career goal, according to Deloitte's 2025 national survey — even as 46 percent of them, employed full-time, live paycheck to paycheck. In Kenya, where young people make up at least 80 percent of the unemployed and over 60 percent of the formal workforce is now under 30, the problem isn't ambivalence about the ladder — it's that there often isn't one to climb, and the generation trying to build one anyway is doing it against an inherited rule that says you do not argue with your elders. Two very different economies, converging on the same quiet generational rebellion against how work used to be done.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇪 Kenya

🇧🇪 Belgium

Kenya's generational shift is happening inside a labor market under real strain. World Bank and FRED-tracked data put youth unemployment stubbornly high, with young people accounting for at least 80 percent of the country's unemployed, and coverage of the 2026 African Youth Survey found Kenyan youth the least optimistic on the continent about both jobs and the broader economy. Against that backdrop, the generational culture clash documented by outlets like Eastleigh Voice and workplace researchers is strikingly specific: nearly two-thirds of Kenyan Gen Z workers reportedly expect a promotion within their first two years, a sharp break from a millennial cohort commonly described as having been raised to "keep their heads down and be grateful." The friction isn't really about ambition — both generations have it — it's about the inherited rule that respect means deference to elders and silence toward superiors, a norm Gen Z is openly renegotiating even as it draws accusations of having been "spoiled by the internet."

Belgium's generational story runs on the opposite economic footing but arrives at a strangely similar emotional place. Deloitte's 2025 Belgian Gen Z and Millennial Survey found only 8 percent of Gen Z respondents naming corporate advancement as their primary career goal, with financial security, job stability, and work-life balance ranking far higher instead — a preference that reads as modest until you note that 46 percent of Belgian Gen Z employees, in full-time work, still report living paycheck to paycheck. Burnout is explicit and measured, not anecdotal: 48 percent of Belgian Gen Z and 37 percent of millennials report feeling burned out by their workload, and coverage from local outlet 20something.be frames the resulting disengagement as a quieter, less visible crisis than unemployment, but a real one. The generational split within the younger cohorts themselves is also documented directly — millennials in Belgium tend to prioritize sustainability as a workplace value, while Gen Z prioritizes mental health support more specifically.

The Reckoning

The structural irony is that Kenya's younger generation is pushing hard against scarcity — fighting for promotions, for a fairer hierarchy, for jobs that exist at all — while Belgium's younger generation is pushing back against abundance that doesn't feel secure, opting out of ladder-climbing not because opportunity is scarce but because the stability it's supposed to buy no longer feels reliably attached to full-time work. Both generational shifts get read by older colleagues, in both countries, through a similar lens of impatience or entitlement — but the underlying demand in each case is coherent on its own terms: Kenyan Gen Z wants the hierarchy to actually reward effort within a reasonable timeframe; Belgian Gen Z wants the security that was promised by the traditional career path even as they decline to chase its traditional markers of success.

The other shared thread is a redefinition of what "respect" and "leadership" mean, expressed almost identically across two very different cultural starting points. Kenyan sources describe younger workers reinterpreting respect as open dialogue rather than silent deference; Belgian sources describe younger workers demanding transparent communication and visible leadership support rather than assumed authority. Neither generation is rejecting hierarchy outright — both are asking that it justify itself more explicitly than it used to.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

20something.be (Belgian youth outlet) — A piece on the "unspoken crisis" of Gen Z at work argued that burnout among young Belgian professionals was quietly more corrosive than unemployment statistics suggested, because it was happening to people who were, on paper, doing everything right — full-time jobs, degrees, steady employment — and still felt precarious.

Medium (Kenya workplace commentary) — A piece comparing generational perspectives across Kenyan and African offices described millennials as having internalized a survival-mode work ethic shaped by scarcer opportunity, which made Gen Z's more assertive boundary-setting look, to older colleagues, like a lack of gratitude rather than a different response to changed circumstances.

Reddit — A young professional in Brussels described the disconnect of being praised for "resilience" by an older manager after a stretch of unpaid overtime, when what they actually wanted was for the unpaid overtime to stop being asked for in the first place.

Eastleigh Voice (Kenyan outlet) — Coverage of Gen Z's influence on Kenyan office culture quoted young professionals describing pushback from older colleagues who read direct requests for feedback or clearer expectations as insubordination, rather than the practical clarity-seeking it was intended as.

GeoPoll survey commentary — Research on Gen Z attitudes across Africa cautioned against treating the generation as a monolith, noting that Kenyan Gen Z workplace expectations varied significantly by region and economic background, complicating any single narrative about what the generation collectively wants.

Conclusion

If you're managing across this generational line in either country, the mistake is the same: assuming the younger cohort's demands are a discipline problem rather than a rational response to the actual conditions they're operating in. In Kenya, that means a labor market too tight and a hierarchy too rigid for the promotion timeline Gen Z is asking for. In Belgium, it means a full-time job that no longer reliably delivers the security it's supposed to, even as burnout climbs. Neither generation is asking for less work — they're asking the deal to actually hold. If a friend asked me over drinks: stop calling it entitlement and start reading it as a receipt.