Dive Brief:
- More workers are struggling than thriving in their lives for the first time since Gallup began tracking the life evaluation of the U.S. workforce, according to the global analytics and advisory firm.
- Just 28% of workers say now is a good time to find a quality job, Gallup also found — a precipitous drop from mid-2022, when 70% of workers said the same.
- Relatedly, worker engagement has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, with 31% of workers reporting feeling engaged. The conditions have coalesced to result in a workforce that is “restless but largely immobile,” Gallup said.
Dive Insight:
While self-evaluation of thriving and outlook on the job market has dropped across the board, certain groups have been more heavily represented among those feeling the pain.
Federal workers, for example, “stand out for the severity and speed of their decline,” Gallup said. In 2022, 60% of federal employees reported they were thriving — six points higher than the average worker’s reported 54%. By 2025, their rate of thriving dropped 12 points to 48%. Average workers also reported a 48% rate of thriving last year, but their drop was a comparative six points.
More educated workers are also more pessimistic, Gallup said — a finding that “could reflect white-collar hiring slowdowns and layoffs in professional sectors.” Prior to 2025, workers with college degrees consistently reported that it was a “good time” to find a job in larger numbers than those without. Last year, that pattern reversed sharply, with only 19% of college-educated workers reporting such by the end of the year, compared to 35% of workers without college degrees.
Younger workers were more pessimistic about the job market as well; Generation Z and millennial workers are the most pessimistic, with 19% and 24% reporting it is a “good time” to find a job, respectively, followed by Generation X (33%) and baby boomers (42%).
Gallup’s findings track with a broader unease among workers about the implications of AI adoption in the workplace alongside a struggling economy. Layoffs in technology, spurred in part by AI adoption, have hurt confidence among tech industry workers, Glassdoor found earlier this month. Meanwhile, more Gen Z workers have begun exploring blue-collar roles — regardless of education level — in search of a job less likely to be replaced with artificial intelligence.
The downshift in engagement and rise in pessimism aligns with Glassdoor’s November assessment that power has now shifted toward employers, with layoff anxiety high and workers losing faith in their leaders.