A Letter to the Class of 2025

Time​ Magazine

11-05-2025

By and Michelle Peng
If you're graduating this year, you've already lived through more upheaval than most generations experience in a decade. Your formative educational experiences were marked by a global pandemic, remote learning, rising inflation, political unrest, and a job market that seems to shift monthly. And now, you're entering a workforce being rapidly reshaped by AI, hybrid work, and new expectations about what a career even means.
Everything that you've endured has already exercised one of the most critical skills you'll need in your career and life— resilience. The ability to adapt, stay grounded through uncertainty, to keep going when the path isn't clear, isn't just a personal strength. It's a professional superpower. In a world where change is the only constant, resilience will be one of the most valuable assets you can bring into your workplace.Resilience will also carry you forward. Whether you've already landed the job you hoped for, you're still searching, or you're trying to make sense of the one you've got, that strength will serve as your foundation. Wherever you're starting from, here's some wisdom to help you navigate the early steps of your career with clarity, confidence, and perspective.
You've already landed your dream job.
First of all, congratulations! We don't have to tell you that this is a tough job market, with hiring for new grads down 16% compared to last year and 44% below 2022 levels, according to new data from Gusto. To hit the ground running in your first job, here are some things to keep in mind:
Keep using AI in a way that helps you grow, think, and lead. We know that most of you are already using tools like ChatGPT regularly, and 77% of new grads expect to use genAI in the workplace. While Charter has covered the ways that improper AI use can lead to lower-quality work, make work less satisfying, and even annoy your peers, we're confident that using AI in combination with your critical thinking skills can make work more productive and rewarding.
As our colleague Jacob Clemente recently wrote, mastering how to direct AI agents may also help you practice key leadership skills and behaviors for managing human teams, including 'fluid intelligence—i.e., the ability to solve novel problems—emotional perceptiveness, and economic decision-making, which refers to how good someone is at allocating resources,' as well as 'asking more questions and having more back-and-forth exchanges.'
Because genAI makes it easier than ever to generate reports, ideas, and even prototypes, your ability of discernment can set you apart from your peers. 'Sharpen your opinions and taste, because it matters even more when AI can do the drudgery and do the mundane work,' says Aparna Chennapragada, chief product officer of experiences and devices management at Microsoft. 'What makes a difference is the why… And that's where your human judgment comes in.'
That means staying curious and constantly learning, whether that's asking questions about how things work, trying out a new AI use case, or setting aside time to learn about what your peers, superiors, and superiors' peers are working on.
We've also seen again and again the value of building trust and deepening relationships for workers at any level. One of the best ways to get ahead is to lift others up—an idea that's backed up by organizational psych research on status at work. Take opportunities to express your gratitude for teammates' contributions and highlight other people's wins, a practice Carnegie Mellon researcher Rosalind Chow calls ' good gossip.' Research indicates that good gossip and ' dual promotion,' a process where you highlight your own and others' achievements at the same time, can benefit you, too. 'As you make other people more visible, you also become more visible,' explains Chow.
You have… a job.
Landing a job—not the job—can feel like a relief and let down simultaneously. Maybe it's not your dream role. Maybe it's not even close. And while everyone on LinkedIn is 'thrilled to announce' something shiny and seemingly perfect you're trying to reconcile this first step and make it feel like it makes sense.Having a job is not a failure. It's a starting point and it's more normal than you think. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person holds over 12 different jobs by the time they're 55. In fact, many of the most successful people you admire didn't start with roles that lit them up. What matters more than the title or company is how you use the experience. What are you learning? What skills are you building? What relationships will you nurture? What parts of the job give you energy? What parts take it away?
This is where the idea of a portfolio career comes in. The old model, pick a lane, stay in it, is fading to give way to something more dynamic. Instead, you can expect and should be intentional about your career being a collection of roles, experiences, side projects, and pivots that will build on each other over time. Portfolio careers are diverse in nature, you don't necessarily have to be both a doctor and a lawyer, nor do you need to get paid for each aspect of your portfolio, but the yield is diversification in your identity, skillset, and your ability to pivot, navigate change.Ultimately, the throughline isn't the job titles, It's you. Your values, your curiosity, your adaptability, and how you treat people will shape what's ahead of you. The story that you're telling with your work is only one that you can write and that means that you can change direction and evolve. The key is knowing how to name the shifts, why you moved, what you gained, and what you're aiming toward. When you can articulate your own narrative, it not only gives you clarity, it also helps others understand your journey, advocate for you, and open doors to new opportunities.
You're still looking.
Don't stress—landing that offer letter often takes longer than you'd expect. One survey of 2025 graduates found that 82% expect to start working within three months of graduating, while 77% of recent graduates say they started work that quickly.
If you're looking to game out a job search strategy based on labor market trends, recent reporting reveals some sure bets: manufacturing is expected to add millions of jobs in the coming years, healthcare and education employment typically remains stable during recessions (and are relatively insulated from the effects of AI automation), and some of the fastest growing job titles are ' middle-skill ' roles that come with a six-figure salary and do not require a college degree.
But with portfolio careers becoming increasingly common, skills can come from unexpected places, so we encourage you to follow your curiosities rather than trying to divine future labor market fluctuations. If you have the bandwidth and the financial flexibility to do so, take on some projects that flex new skills on a volunteer or freelance basis. (That's how I (Michelle) first started working with Charter—as one of many paid and unpaid projects doing research, growth marketing, and administrative support for organizations as diverse as a restorative justice nonprofit, a hospitality workers' union, a design firm, and a college alumni group.)
Living in Los Angeles, I've also seen countless instances of college-educated peers gaining invaluable skills in nontraditional jobs. Friends have taken jobs bartending, delivering bagels, and serving wedding banquets to make ends meet due to a historic contraction of the entertainment industry and the gig-based nature of creative work. Through those experiences, they've practiced leading teams, delegating responsibilities amid competing deadlines, and building relationships in high-stress environments, preparing them both for any future big job and the possibility of that big job ending.
When in doubt, there's never a shortage of work that requires working with others to make your community better. Many of my friends who have left the entertainment industry are pivoting into work that feels fundamentally human and requires the kind of connections that are unlikely to be entirely displaced by technology, including teaching, therapy, and community organizing.
That's what I did in summer 2020, jobless and fresh off a post-grad fellowship. I found my way to Arizona, where I joined a political campaign and spent eight hours a day talking to strangers about the upcoming election. Spending eight hours a day under the desert sun, decked out in a KN95, a plastic face shield, and a fluorescent safety vest, was not how I expected spending my second year out of college. But the time I spent connecting with voters about issues as diverse as healthcare, education, and immigration gave me a crash course in how to tell a compelling story and build the trust necessary to hear others'—a skill I'll use everyday in my current role and all the years to come.