The Young Salaryman Who Wants Seniority Back: Generations at Work in Japan and France

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Just as Japan's lifetime-employment system looked ready to finally collapse under generational rebellion, its newest recruits did something nobody predicted: 56.3 percent of new hires told the SANNO Institute's 2025 Company Life Survey they actually prefer seniority-based promotion, the first time that preference has led since 2006. Meanwhile in France, a 2025 EDHEC Business School study of over 9,000 young Europeans found French Gen Z favouring flexibility, career pivots, and small companies over tradition and hierarchy — moving in exactly the direction Japan's youngest workers just quietly stepped back from.

Do's & Don'ts

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan: A Surprising Swing Back Toward Structure

Japan's employment system has spent the past decade visibly fraying. Non-permanent workers are projected to exceed 40 percent of the total workforce for the first time by 2026, and reporting from the World Economic Forum and multiple 2025-2026 analyses describes lifetime employment giving way to what one report calls "zigzag careers" — driven by labour shortages, post-pandemic reform, and, as most coverage assumed, generational rebellion against rigid seniority structures.

What the 2025 SANNO Institute Company Life Survey found complicates that narrative considerably: 56.3 percent of new hires expressed a preference for seniority-based promotion over merit-based advancement, the first time this preference has topped the annual survey since 2006. Read alongside continuing economic uncertainty, the finding suggests younger Japanese workers aren't uniformly rejecting the old system so much as some are reaching back toward its predictability, even as structural change — nearly half of Japanese companies now moving toward skills-based talent models, per recent WEF-linked research — continues around them regardless of what any individual cohort prefers.

France: Flexibility as the New Aspiration

French Gen Z's trajectory looks more like the story Japan's youth were expected to tell. The EDHEC Business School NewGen Talent Centre's 2025 survey of 9,332 young adults across seven European countries, including France, found a marked shift toward flexibility, career pivots, and smaller employers, away from the traditional prestige-and-hierarchy track that has long defined elite French career paths. Hofstede Insights scores France notably high on power distance, 68, alongside a moderately high long-term orientation of 63 — a profile that has historically rewarded patient, hierarchical career-building, the exact model this generation now says it wants less of.

The tension this creates is structural rather than merely generational friction: French corporate culture, discussed earlier in this series for its formal probation periods and hierarchy-driven mentorship, wasn't built to flex easily around employees who want to pivot careers every few years rather than climb a single, clearly marked ladder.

The Reckoning

The genuinely counterintuitive finding is that Japan and France appear to be moving in opposite directions on the same axis at almost the same moment. Japan's newest workers, despite a decade of headlines about generational rebellion against rigid seniority systems, are statistically leaning back toward exactly that structure — very possibly a rational response to economic uncertainty rather than nostalgia. France's newest workers, arriving from a culture with deep, historically stable hierarchical career tracks, are leaning toward the flexibility and structural looseness that Japan's system is only reluctantly, structurally being forced into from above.

Neither shift is complete, and neither is simple generational rebellion in the way the popular narrative assumes. Both countries illustrate the same underlying lesson: don't assume a country's youngest workers want the opposite of what their elders built. Sometimes, as Japan's 2025 data shows, they want a steadier version of exactly that.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone answering a question about whether Gen Z is changing workplace culture for the better argued the generation isn't rejecting structure itself so much as rejecting structure that offers no security in return — a distinction they said gets flattened every time older colleagues describe younger workers as simply impatient or disloyal.

teamblind.com — A poster discussing Japanese corporate hiring trends noted that new graduates at more traditional firms seemed genuinely relieved by clear, seniority-based promotion timelines during a period of broader economic anxiety, describing the predictability as a selling point in interviews rather than a compromise.

Reddit — Someone who moved from a French multinational to a Japanese company described the reversal as disorienting — they'd expected the more rigid hierarchy in Tokyo, but found their French colleagues back home were actually the ones pushing harder for flexible, pivot-friendly career paths once they compared notes.

Reddit — A younger French employee reflecting on job searching in 2025 said the biggest shift from their older siblings' experience wasn't pay or title but the near-total normalization of leaving a prestigious employer for a smaller company, something that would have been treated as a strange step back a decade earlier.

Conclusion

If generational alignment matters to your decision, resist the instinct to assume every country's youngest workers are pushing in the same direction — toward flexibility, away from hierarchy. Japan's newest data suggests exactly the opposite is happening there right now, at least on the seniority question, while France's youngest workers are moving toward the flexibility Japan's are quietly stepping back from. Ask a prospective employer, in either country, what its actual new-hire cohort wants this year, not what the national stereotype from five years ago would predict. If a friend asked which country's generational shift to bet a long career on: Japan's youth-driven return to structure is more predictable in the short term; France's youth-driven push for flexibility is the better long-term bet if you value reinvention over stability.