THEY are 30 years old, but feel like they are 50. Instead of revelling in the energy and rude health that youth affords, they are worrying about their debts, regretting their career choices and dreaming of leaving their job to find personal satisfaction.

A new report into the lives of today’s 25 to 35-year-old high-flyers has found that many feel caught in a “career trap”, anxious to move on to pastures new, but too weighed down by student, mortgage and credit-card debt to move.

Nearly six in ten (59 per cent) say that their job does not fulfil their wider life ambitions, while more than half (57 per cent) say they are currently looking for a new job, and one in four hope to change their job within the next year.

The survey, commissioned by Common Purpose, a charity that campaigns for better leadership, also found that more than eight in ten (82 per cent) believe that employers risk losing their most talented young executives by not allowing them to develop their life goals as well as their career ambitions.

Julia Middleton, chief executive and founder of Common Purpose, said it was clear from the findings that the “danger age” when employers stood to lose their talented employees was 30.

“These findings are a warning shot across the bows for employers. Emerging leaders want to make a good living, but they also want to make a difference.

“Employers who invest time in providing opportunities for their fast trackers to explore how society works and get engaged in the wider world will hang on to their talent. Those who don’t and who force young managers to choose between work and making a difference won’t,” she said.

Ms Middleton said that employers needed to encourage their young executives to develop their extra-curricular activities. She cited the case of one young woman in her late 20s working for a major financial institution who had been offered a place at a prestigious amateur ballet company. Because her ballet commitments made it difficult for her to accept foreign postings, the company sacked her.

“The skills of self-discipline and creativity and the motivation and energy that she got from her ballet could have been so useful to the company, but they just could not see this,” Ms Middleton said.

Employers also needed to adopt a nurturing attitude to up-and-coming 25 to 35-year-olds, she said.

“You have to give them managers who can nurture rather than kill them. Every generation is different but there is a whole group of middle managers who just don’t understand that the new generation today wants more flexibility. As a result they lose talent,” she said. Damian Barr, author of Get It Together, Surviving Your Quarterlife Crisis, said that by the time they reached 30, many high-flyers were probably in their second or third job and were beginning to realise that the problems that they had initially attributed to a particular boss or place of work, were in fact because of their career choice. “That’s when a lot of people decide to go travelling, to return to university or to move to the country,” he said.

He added that today’s generation of 25 to 30-year-olds had far higher expectations from life than their parents or grandparents’, a factor that he attributed in part to the spread of university education and tuition fees. “For someone who had to work in two jobs to pay off their loans at the same time as studying, they may feel they have a right to expect more from life at the end of it,” he said.

The Common Purpose study is based on a survey of 1,000 25 to 35-year-old employees and focus group interviews with 12 high-flyers.

A separate survey of 2,500 adults conducted by the Future Laboratory for Standard Life, has found that thirtysomething executives who have managed to build up substantial equity in their homes are increasingly ready to cash in on their investments, quit the rat-race and start a new career.

Martin Raymond, who is the author of the report and managing director of The Future Laboratory, said: “This generation of thirtysomethings doesn’t want to play the corporate game any longer.

“They want to do things for themselves, rely on themselves, and have stopped trusting government and business to look after them.”

TRAPS AND TIPS

Top five career traps for 25 to 35-year-old high-flyers

Too few role models and too few colleagues to listen and offer advice

And top tips for employers from those same high-flying wannabes

Provide us with mentors who can nurture us; nurture the nurturers

Source: Common Purpose

DEBATE

Do 30-somethings have anything to complain about?
Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s world
• Believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend