What the young want, and why creating good jobs is no longer optional

Since aspirations are long-term goals and not easily malleable, opinion What the young want, and why creating good jobs is no longer optional These men and women continue to aim for formal sector jobs or to become dynamic entrepreneurs a year after.

Key points

• 6 min readAug 24, 2026 06: 15 AM IST First published on: Aug 24, 2026 at 06: 15 AM IST.
• Let's compare the above statistics with the occupational data from the PLFS in 2023.
• What are the hopes and desires of young job seekers in urban India?
• The writer is professor of Economics, ISI (Delhi), and visiting professor, NCAER.
• Policymakers must reckon with the fact that this generation is demanding good career opportunities.

Policymakers must reckon with the fact that this generation is demanding good career opportunities. (File Photo). Written by: Farzana Afridi.

What are the hopes and desires of young job seekers in urban India? In the summer of 2023, armed with a long list of questions, we set out to survey over 3, 000 randomly sampled men and women, 24 years of age on average, and living in the middle-class residential areas of Delhi. Our interest lay in understanding their journey towards employment – whether they were at present working or looking for work, or were planning to start their job search shortly. The answers we obtained opened a window into the aspirations of this generation.

Almost 70 per cent of respondents – more men than women – informed us they were looking for a job opportunity that would put them on their ideal career path from the start, instead of settling for just any job. Their career goal was predominantly being in salaried or formal-sector employment. While only 14 per cent of the women we interviewed preferred being self-employed, more women job seekers aspired to these salaried positions. In contrast, more than a third of men wanted to start their own enterprises. Contrary to the dominant narrative of solid preference for public-sector salaried jobs, a comparable share of these men and women were looking for private-sector salaried jobs.

Let's compare the above statistics with the occupational data from the PLFS in 2023. Less than 50 per cent of India's urban workforce is in salaried jobs, a figure that is even lower for our age group of respondents – merely one in every three employed 24-year-old holds a salaried job. No more than 10 per cent of our urban workforce is in the public sector or administration jobs, and only concerning 15 per cent are in the formal private sector. Of those working, 40 per cent are self-employed but an overwhelming majority of these are subsistence businesses that do not hire any worker and have an annual turnover of less than Rs 10 lakh. So what are the odds of one of our job seekers landing her preferred salaried job or establishing a unicorn? Undoubtedly, the odds are stacked against these aspirational men and women.

But even if the probability of getting their preferred job is low, could they obtain a job, even if not ideal, that could offer them salaries they aspire to? We asked respondents regarding their salary expectations from a range of jobs – accounts keeper, teacher in primary school, data entry operator, hospital attendant or electrician. We estimate the deviation of these salary expectations from the actual earnings for these jobs in urban India in the PLFS. Our job seekers expect up to 40 per cent higher salary than actual earnings documented in the PLFS for the same occupation. Male job seekers, in particular, show greater over-optimism in salary expectations relative to women, expecting almost Rs 8, 000 more per month than the actual average earnings for these jobs and Rs 8, 500 more per month for salaried jobs. Altogether, salary expectations diverge from reality by more than 30 per cent. When we assess the job aspirations and expectations of job seekers who are below 25 years of age in our sample, we find that expectations are even more skewed – again, more so for young men than young women.

Are the youth in our cities simply out of touch with labour-market realities? There can be a number of reasons for these misalignments and high expectations – lack of information or misinformation and inexperience with the job market, to name a couple of obvious explanations. We tested one hypothesis – can information regarding real-world job opportunities and salaries correct these job-market misperceptions? So we set out to inform and expose a random subset of our 3, 000 job seekers to the real world and re-surveyed both the informed and the non-informed a year afterwards. Twelve months after receiving information, we find that providing accurate information regarding job opportunities significantly dampened job seekers' labour-market expectations of landing their ideal job relative to those who were not informed. Men, in particular, were less probable to report that they were on their ideal career path. This disillusionment is accompanied by a decline in men's job-search intensity. As preferred job offers fail to materialise, job seekers adjust their expectations downwards and either remain in the same jobs or drop out of the labour market and enrol at educational institutions, thus.

Not surprisingly, correct information seems to have created the job seekers realise that their expectations were too high. But did it additionally change the aspirations of these job seekers? The answer is a clear "no". Perhaps it is not surprising that the aspirations did not change. Since aspirations are long-term goals and not easily malleable, these men and women continue to aim for formal-sector jobs or to become dynamic entrepreneurs a year after. Our job seekers are willing to bide their time. Add to these aspirations the rising cost of good-quality education – more probable to be accessed through private educational institutions – then their job-market expectations are not just aspirational but necessary to recover the high cost of education.

Policymakers must reckon with the fact that this generation is demanding good career opportunities – and that realising their aspirations will require nothing short of a structural transformation of the economy. The challenge of formalising our labour markets by creating jobs with regular pay and benefits is a first-order concern. While the new labour codes are a step in the right direction, creating "good" jobs and genuine career paths – not just jobs – is no longer optional. Failing to do so risks squandering the potential of an entire generation.

In practice, the writer is professor of Economics, ISI (Delhi), and visiting professor, NCAER.

For now, what the young want, and why creating good jobs is no longer remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.