For generations, graduates have been advised to plan their careers: pick a job, plan for promotion, and know exactly where you want to be in 10 years. But former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg believes this advice is dangerously outdated.
“Don’t plan your career when the future is uncertain,” Meta’s former chief operating officer just told Brandeis University graduates. “You don’t need a ten-year plan. If I had one, I would miss the Internet.”
Sandberg, who went on to become one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, knows firsthand how tempting it can be to stick to a strict plan when the job market looks shaky, and what it’s like to enter the workforce during a period of massive technological disruption.
After graduating from Harvard in 1991, the Internet as we knew it barely existed—the World Wide Web had just been invented and wasn’t released to the public until two years later.
After leaving school, she worked in the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, but when the administration ended, she struggled to find her next job.
“There were days – and I’m not being dramatic – I thought I would never find one,” she added. “When I finally got the offer, I was worried that the company might not survive.” That company was called Google.
Of course, it has since become one of the most valuable companies in the world: Today, Google is worth $4.7 trillion. Sandberg benefited greatly from her early arrival, growing the sales team from four to 4,000 people and later becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man. None of this could have been planned. The technology and the characters it would create didn’t exist yet.
“I wish someone had told me during these months of fear that planning is never a life raft,” she said.
Gen Z’s perspective: In an AI-disrupted job market, where today’s graduates are pursuing roles that may look completely different (or disappear entirely) in a few years, it’s not only pointless to try to plan for their future. This may cause them to miss out on opportunities to change their lives.
“You don’t need a ten-year plan,” she concluded. “You need two things: a short-term direction, which is what you want to work toward now, and a long-term dream, which is a sense of the life you want to build.”
“Don’t try to connect the two points,” she continued. “The road will surprise you, and the opportunities are in those surprises.”
Sheryl Sandberg tells Gen Z that graduation is always the worst year — and she has proof
Sandberg’s advice comes at a particularly anxious time for young workers. Generation Z graduates are entering the workforce, which is being revolutionized by artificial intelligence.
From OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, technology leaders continue to sound the alarm that entire professions may soon be wiped out by artificial intelligence. The World Economic Forum warned in January 2025 that nearly half of the world’s bosses planned to lay off workers and replace them with robots within the next four years. Junior workers are obviously the first to be attacked.
Sandberg acknowledges this fear.
“I know many of you are concerned about what happens next,” she said. “You’ve seen the headlines: This year’s graduates face the toughest job market in decades.”
But she also emphasized to future bright young people that this is nothing new. She also brought receipts to prove it.
“Let me read some other headlines: This year’s college graduates face a daunting task finding jobs in the worst economic climate since the Great Recession of 2003,” Sandberg said. “Hopes of an easy job search were dashed in 2009 as graduates entered the weakest market in decades.” She read out old headlines from 1971 about graduates entering the worst job market.
“Declaring this year the worst is a tradition almost as old as graduation itself,” she added. “I’m not telling you the job market is easy, but every generation has figured it out.”
CEOs agree Gen Z should abandon five-year plans
Sandberg isn’t the only powerful voice asking workers to relax on the five-year plan. Ryan Roslansky, executive vice president of LinkedIn and Microsoft Office, recently called artificial intelligence “obsolete” given how much it will change the workplace.
“The reality is that when you understand technology and the labor market and everything is happening at your feet, I think it’s a little silly to have a five-year plan,” Roslansky said in an interview. no one knows what they are doing Podcast Episodes.
Liz Baker, CEO of Greater Good Charities, which has generated more than $1 billion in impact in 121 countries, puts it more bluntly: “If I had a five-year plan five years ago and we stuck to it, we wouldn’t exist. You have to be nimble.” Her organization now develops plans every six months, and sometimes every three months, to keep up with the pace of change.
“Things are changing so fast,” she told wealth.
But as Sandberg suggests, some loose long-term planning can be useful.
Likewise, Asana CEO Dan Rogers believes that without some kind of vision for the future, it’s hard to know where to start. He has an ambitious 25-year plan: to become a Silicon Valley CEO. He doesn’t know how he’s going to achieve that, but every decision he makes in the short term has the end goal in mind.
“If you don’t know what your goals are, you probably won’t achieve your goals,” he told wealthwhile pointing to Michael Jordan, who reportedly hung an NBA poster over his bed when he was five years old — not a plan, but a vision he never gave up.
His advice to Gen Z? Articulate their mission in life, picture it in their minds, and keep it front and center in every career decision thereafter.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
