The Places Where Millennials Want to Work

With a few notable exceptions, people are generally more interested in telling you where they are heading (city, a state or even coast), than the company they are going to work for. It's true that company often correlates with location, but as banks, tech firms & diversifieds continuing to, erm, diversify, their office locations, that's not always the case. So we've taken a non-geographical approach with this chart, and focused exclusively on which companies were identified by 14,000 of the top-performing high-school and college-aged millennials in the United States as places where they might want to work. The data was sourced from the 2017 and 2018 Career Interest Surveys published by the NSHSS.

The data paints an anxiety-inducing picture for today's corporate titans. Of the S&P top 50 corporations, only three companies (Amazon, 3M and IBM) were more desirable in 2018 than they were in 2017. The remainder were either static, had slipped in the rankings, or had been too small to count under the 2017 methodology. Most importantly (if I were head of HR for a large American company), fourteen S&P 50 companies did not receive even a single vote out of the total 43,000 cast (14.3k students x 3 votes).

On the other hand, numerous workplaces that are not publicly listed companies (like the number one spot, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital) are extremely attractive in the minds of the upcoming workforce. Our take from this is that- with the exception of a few famous brands - kids today are thinking about jobs the same way they are thinking about a lot of things: with a preference for a unique and fulfilling experience over the safe and staid.