May 19, 2022 | Jay Stansell

Future Ready Insights: American Lifestyle Cohorts

In this article, our data team examines Find Your Grind’s proprietary Lifestyle Assessment data and shares a unique set of insights with regard to the Lifestyle expectations of the next generation of American adults.

The Find Your Grind Lifestyle Assessment is the first step toward a more purposeful life and career journey. Students need more than a list of outdated job titles that match a personality type. Instead, they need a framework that changes the way they see themselves in the changing landscape of work.

Our curriculum, rooted in social-emotional learning and reflective practice, helps learners develop greater self and social awareness, gain exposure to careers and industries, and begin the process of designing their ideal lifestyle. Check out our standards alignment here.

The Find Your Grind Lifestyles

At Find Your Grind, we’ve developed and identified sixteen unique Lifestyle categories that sit at the center of every learner’s personalized experience. No learner is 100% of either Lifestyle, instead, we illustrate to learners and their educators, how each learner is represented as a mix of Lifestyle matches.

We won’t go into detail about each Lifestyle in this post, instead, we’ll identify how the American population of learners are smart-matched to the first match and top 3 matches of Lifestyles on Find Your Grind.

A generation of Connectors

When looking at aggregate data for the first match, we can see the Connector Lifestyle is represented strongest in the data, followed by Entertainers and Creators.

Learners on Find Your Grind are smart-matched to their top 3 Lifestyles. To understand what a generation of Connectors, Entertainers, and Creators may look like, we turned to the Find Your Grind mentor list. This list features nearly 200 mentors that inspire and humanize career paths and share real-life stories of how they found success by embracing their lifestyles. Digging into the mentor library with an exact match across all 3 Lifestyles, we find Ross Dwyer, Sneaker Editor. You may be asking, Sneaker Editor is a career? Check out what Ross does as Sneaker Editor for a living by logging into Find Your Grind, or contact us to learn more about our growing list of careers of the future.

While these Lifestyles are the strongest 3 first matches for learners, followed by Competitors and Analyzers, things start to change when we investigated further to find the most common top 3 matches across our learner cohort.

Connectors, Entertainers, and Entrepreneurs are here

The most common top 3 Lifestyle matches across all Find Your Grind data are Connector, Entertainer, and Entrepreneur.

A combination of these Lifestyles is interesting as we start to do some correlation between Find Your Grind Lifestyle matches and the broader Gen-Z lifestyle expectations. Before we discuss, let’s briefly understand the Find Your Grind definitions of these three lifestyles:

• Connectors thrive in social environments, love to talk and listen, and are able to relate to almost anyone. Connectors love people and are able to quickly evaluate both their good and bad qualities. They add value by connecting people to others in their network who would mutually gain from the relationship. People introduced by Connectors often develop fast personal and business relationships. They are essential to growth, development, and people roles.
• Entertainers have a captivating nature that charms a room! They love to make others happy and can socialize effortlessly. They are often referred to as “the life of the party”. Entertainers crave positive feedback, energy from others, and affirmations, but are also independent, observant, and possess a strong sense of self. Given that Entertainers are centerstage, discerning constructive feedback from noise is one of the greatest skills they master.
• Entrepreneurs are creative, highly motivated, and born risk-takers. Their natural sense of independence and unique confidence in their own ideas enable them to be their own boss, though they can achieve success in many ways. Their sense of urgency and commitment to excellence inspires others to work harder. Entrepreneurs are constantly seeking improvement and efficiency in process, practice, and decision-making. They are the “risk managers” that reap big rewards.

Connector and Entertainer Lifestyles remain in both data sets. They are the top 2 of the most common first Lifestyle matches and are the top 2 in the most common top 3 Lifestyle matches. However, Entrepreneur is the tenth out of sixteen lifestyles for the most common first match. What this tells us is that while an Entrepreneur Lifestyle is rarely a learner’s first match, a huge portion of learners recognize that some form of Entrepreneurship needs are in their future lifestyles.

This is a critical data point to observe and is why career-readiness learning needs to be consistently invested in. When you research the number of career opportunities that have been created from technology that did not exist 5 years ago, it’s easy to understand why Gen-Z have a craving to provide for themselves, to create, take risks, and control their own path. For example, 75% of millennials want the ability to work flexibly and still be on track for a promotion, while Gen Z prefers to connect and collaborate remotely and online¹.

At Find Your Grind, we are constantly building learning content that reveals careers of the future. For instance, we are the only career readiness platform that uses video content to bring to life Entrepreneur-based careers of the future, such as Sneaker Designer, Blockchain Developer, YouTuber, and Esports Athlete.

Different States, Different Lifestyle Needs

A huge benefit for learners in using a personalized learning product is that learners are served learning activities that are relevant to them as an individual. For Find Your Grind learners, this means they are served learning activities that represent their uniqueness. This is important as we see regional differences in Lifestyle matches across the United States.

Connector, Entertainer, and Creator are a top match in Washington and Ohio, but not in any other states.

Utah, New Hampshire, and New York’s strongest matches are Entertainer, Connector, and Creator, while California, Nebraska, and Texas all feature Analyzer in their top 3 Lifestyle matches!

Lifestyle-first is a new classroom conversation

Bringing the conversation into the classroom around what lifestyles learners may desire in the future can be tricky when approaching it for the first time. Find Your Grind is here to help, as every unit contains classroom guides and activities to help educators and learners have these new conversations, and to inspire learners to think about their future in new ways.

To learn more about how having a lifestyle-first conversation will improve the future readiness of your learners, please contact us.

1. Ahead Thought Leadership. (2020, May 10). The impact of the gig economy on the future of work, Webex Ahead. https://webexahead.webex.com/the-impact-of-the-gig-economy-on-the-future-of-work/