Young Folks, Top Spots
Early- to mid-career professionals hold a higher share of top executive jobs in Baton Rouge than nearly any metro in the South. Highlighting this is a good way to attract young strivers to the region.
While it may seem intuitive, recent surveys highlight something for communities and companies looking to recruit young talent to note: this group cares deeply about promotions and other career advancement opportunities. At a time of economic uncertainty nationwide, advancement has become a pain point for many younger workers. Among young workers concerned about the economy, 50% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials believe it will be hard or impossible to get a promotion.
This concern becomes a serious issue for communities and companies trying to attract or retain talent – based on a 2023 survey by the Project Management Institute, 62% of young professionals feel the need to leave their job to receive a promotion. A May 2023 Pew survey backs this up, finding that more young workers are unsatisfied with opportunities for promotion at work (34%) than are satisfied (31%). This research implies that places that offer greater promotion or advancement opportunities have a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting and keeping younger talent. As BRAC and Visit Baton Rouge prepare to launch a large-scale talent attraction campaign this April, it’s key to benchmark where the Capital Region stands in terms of offering advanced positions to young talent1.
The Capital Region has a Significant Number of Young Professionals in Corporate Leadership Positions
Years ago, the federal government created a way to classify different types of jobs across industries, known as Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). For instance, if you’re a practicing attorney, you would fall under SOC 23-1011 whether you work for a law firm, as a prosecutor, or are in-house counsel for a manufacturer – while there are narrow skills that differentiate the three jobs, broadly similar skills and work activities are involved across all three.
Regarding high-ranking leadership positions within organizations, the most relevant SOC is 11-1000, or “Top Executives.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines this job’s responsibilities as to “plan strategies and policies to ensure that an organization meets its goals,” and goes on to state that these professionals “work in nearly every industry, for both small and large organizations. They often have irregular schedules, which may include working evenings and weekends. Travel is common, particularly for chief executives.”
The labor market information platform Lightcast not only allows researchers to track how many workers fall into SOCs like Top Executives for each region of the country, but it also gives a breakdown of workers in these positions by age. The table below benchmarks how many of these leadership positions are held by young talent in Baton Rouge versus other peer and large metro areas in the South.
The data shows that regions across the South tend to offer younger professionals Top Executive opportunities at a greater clip than the country overall, but even among the southern cohort, the Capital Region stands out. Only tech startup hub Austin, which is frequently dubbed “the new Silicon Valley” has a greater percentage of its Top Executive positions held by 25- to 44-year-olds than Baton Rouge. The mid-career cohort of 35- to 44-year-olds has it particularly well in the Baton Rouge, as nearly one-in-three executives in the metro fall in that age range. To the extent that career advancement is important to young talent, Capital Region businesses show more willingness to offer high-level positions to that age group than nearly anywhere else.
While Baton Rouge has areas in which it can improve to bolster talent attraction and retention efforts – things like crime, quality of place, and infrastructure – the region boasts a robust economy in which younger workers have greater earning potential than they would in peer metros, or even major cities once cost of living is factored in. It also offers these workers the opportunity to ascend to upper management positions at a younger age than they would in other high-profile metros in the South. To maximize the impact of the upcoming Better in BTR campaign to recruit top talent to the Capital Region, highlighting these strong economic and career opportunities available in the region is key.
For the Better in BTR talent attraction campaign, young talent is defined as an individual between 25 and 44 years old