A Risk, not a Given: How Young Employees and Leaders Can Work Together to Reduce Early Career Burnout
Early career employees are in a stage where they are still forming their professional identity, learning workplace norms, and developing essential skills. When this developmental phase collides with organisational complexity, rapid change, and rising performance expectations, the likelihood of burnout increases — even for those who currently feel they are coping well.
We recently shared key insights in a report The Reality of Work Stress and Burnout for Early Career Employees based on data from our Leading Mentally Healthy Workplaces survey, which identified those early in their careers as an at-risk demographic for burnout. To build on these insights and better illuminate how they play out in the modern workforce, CMHAA conducted additional, cross-industry focus groups with participants aged 18 to 34.
Together, these qualitative and quantitative findings offer a more nuanced picture of early career employee wellbeing and the factors that can jeopardise it. While the survey showed that 64% of early career employees experience burnout, every focus group participant reported structural factors that could contribute to burnout long-term. This suggests that even if young employees aren’t universally experiencing burnout yet, they are acutely aware of the early warning signs in their peers and leaders. In other words, early career employees appear to see the writing on the wall — perhaps even before leaders do.
Many early career employees also recognised that protecting their wellbeing and working more sustainably requires developing the skills needed to navigate complex workplace environments — including setting boundaries, managing ambiguity and seeking clarity early.
The challenge now is twofold: organisations need to build awareness of burnout risk and take steps to identify and address it promptly, while early career employees need support to develop the capabilities to navigate these pressures with confidence.
Beyond Resilience: Structural Contributors to Early Career Burnout Risk
In recent years, ‘resilience’ has become something of a workplace wellbeing buzzword. While there is undoubtedly value in developing the psychological fortitude to tackle inevitable challenges, an overreliance on resilience training puts the onus on early career employees to “just get on with it.” This can lead to individuals struggling in silence and delaying support-seeking. A more effective approach recognises that resilience must sit alongside both strong organisational systems and the development of practical workplace skills.
Here, we zoom out to identify the most common structural contributors to early career burnout — so that resilience training can exist as another tool in a broader ecosystem, not a band-aid solution.
Workload and Planning Practices
Across the focus groups, workload intensity emerged as the most consistent and prominent risk factor for burnout. Many described environments where urgent tasks accumulate, tight deadlines leave little room for error, and last‑minute changes are commonplace. These patterns were seen as systemic rather than individual issues — shaped by how work is planned, communicated and resourced.
As one focus group participant explained: “There is a severe lack of planning in my organisation… a lot of it is scrambling at the last minute… they should have thought of this six months ago, and they didn’t, and now we have to deal with it.”
These findings were consistent with our survey results, which found 31% of early career employees experience limited control over tasks and decisions, negatively impacting their perception of work. Because young employees are still developing the skills to effectively triage, prioritise, and negotiate workload, poor planning practices hit them harder than more experienced employees — particularly when it feels like they have no control over it. Focus group participants recognised that learning to clarify priorities and raise capacity constraints early is an important capability that is learnt through experience and over time.
Transitions such as promotions or role changes were also identified as points of vulnerability. While not always leading to burnout, early career employees recognised these pivotal moments as times when support is often insufficient. They described a feeling of being thrown in the deep end with minimal training, while simultaneously feeling that they should just be grateful for the opportunity for career development.
Interestingly, too little work was also described as a burnout risk. Early career employees — particularly highly ambitious individuals in competitive graduate programs — reported that insufficient workload created anxiety, self‑doubt, and a sense of not contributing meaningfully. This reflects the developmental reality that those early in their career are still building confidence and rely heavily on external signals to understand whether they are meeting expectations.
Strategies for Change:
- Strengthen upstream planning, ensuring realistic timelines and appropriate resourcing. Recognise that early career employees are not “cheap resources” and that ongoing investment is needed — especially given the opportunities afforded with AI.
- Monitor early career employees’ workload, avoiding chronic overload or underload.
- Create team norms where trade-offs, clarifications and prioritisation are expected and discussed, e.g. leader modelling.
- Provide development training that includes specific questions and trade-off frameworks, e.g. “Which of these tasks should I focus on first?”
- Provide structured support during transitions (such as promotions, rotations, role changes), and ensure early career employees know this help is available.
Role Ambiguity and Recognition Gaps
Unclear expectations were another common source of stress. In tertiary study, students are often told what to do, when to do it, and how to excel at it (i.e., what constitutes a ‘high distinction’). In the workforce, ‘success’ is much more subjective. There is no curriculum, and no rubric. Because those early in their career lack extensive work experience, they cannot easily ‘fill in the gaps’ when expectations are vague. In the focus group, even confident participants acknowledged that ambiguity around “what good looks like” — as well as shifting priorities, and unclear ownership — created unnecessary pressure.
Early career employees expressed a strong desire to better understand “what really matters” so they could prioritise effectively and gain autonomy. As one participant put it: “If businesses can give clarity on what is business critical and then really encourage freedom on the things that are not business critical, it can really help.” Given that research, including our quantitative data, highlights the importance of autonomy for workplace wellbeing, more transparent and collaborative conversations about expectations represent an easy win for organisations.
Recognition also played a meaningful role. Several early career employees noted that feeling unseen or unsure whether their work was valued contributed to burnout risk. An avoidable issue with significant impact, this appears particularly important for those early in their career, who are still forming their sense of competence and belonging.
Strategies for Change:
- Define expectations and success indicators clearly: such as, ‘what good looks like’ or ‘your first 30 days in the role’ guides.
- Make the ‘unwritten rules’ explicit – codify norms to help reduce the cognitive load and learning time.
- Include early career employees in strategic conversations to build context and improve decision-making skills.
Performance Pressure and Perfectionism Norms
Another strong, recurring theme was the pressure early career employees felt to prove their own capabilities — often, at a heavy cost. While personality traits such as being an “overachiever” played a role, high-pressure cultures often amplified these tendencies. Even participants who felt they were coping acknowledged that perfectionism can place early career employees at heightened risk of burnout if not proactively addressed.
As one participant noted: “A lot of my pressure to perform, kind of my whole life actually … that ideology of always wanting to get the highest grade that you get in school from a young age – when that’s translated into the workforce, it isn’t always helpful.” This risk factor is likely to be heightened in non-secure graduate programs, where you have many talented early career professionals competing for a small handful of permanent roles.
These insights suggest that while perfectionism may be an individual trait, particularly common amongst competitive graduate intakes, organisations should avoid reinforcing it. Instead, the focus should be on fostering psychological safety as well as leaders modelling openness and fallibility — so that young employees can build the confidence to ask questions, admit uncertainty and seek support early.
As one participant explained,“ [With robust psychological safety in place] You learn that it’s okay, that you can make a couple mistakes and your career isn’t ruined, that you can be a bit slower. You cannot over promise. You can say it’s going to take an extra day if you think it might do… to take some of the pressure off yourself, to be extraordinary.”
Strategies for Change:
- Provide regular constructive and explicit feedback, both through formal (1-1s, performance reviews) and informal avenues (casual catchups).
- Normalise help‑seeking and developmental pacing, such as through leader modelling, performance expectations and embedding help-seeking into workflows.
- Encourage leaders to share their own early in career learning paths — including the failures, learnings and pivots.
Boundary Setting Skills: A Work in Progress
Learning how to cope with pressure, setting boundaries and managing competing demands are crucial real-world skills that are rarely taught in formal study. While early career employees understood that these skills help buffer against burnout, they also pointed out that this doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s learned over time, through a process of trial and error.
As one participant reflected: “When I started, no, I didn’t [have the strategies]. I think I do now… I think it comes with experience. When you start, you don’t know what to expect, so you don’t know what you’re going to need. It’s only through the experiences that you have that you build your coping tools and mechanisms and know what works for you.”
To reduce burnout risk, organisations should intentionally create the conditions that help early career employees build these necessary workplace skills before pressure overwhelms them. This can look like making the ‘unwritten’ rules visible and explicit and teaching assertive communication skills as essential professional competency (rather than an optional ‘soft skill.’)
Peer support networks also emerged as a key resource to help young employees build these boundary-setting skills. Whether it’s graduate cohort programs with regular catchups or buddy/mentor systems, these initiatives help facilitate conversations around workplace norms. Having these quality, structured peer programs also help to normalise challenges and reduce the isolation that can arise in an unfamiliar environment.
Strategies for Change:
- Ensure organisational leaders model healthy workplace boundaries, such as leaving the office on time and engaging in prioritisation conversations e.g. “we need to deprioritise something here”.
- Provide early career employees with the “language” to have these conversations and embed them into normal team and workload discussions.
- Activate peer cohort and mentoring networks and maintain them beyond the onboarding period to reduce isolation and normalise shared challenges.
The Manager as a Risk or Protective Factor
Managerial capability was consistently identified as a central determinant of early career employee wellbeing. Survey results showed that 62% of those early in career viewed their manager as a ‘make or break’ source of support, and the focus group discussions reinforced this.
As one participant summed up: “Your direct line manager has such a big impact… same grad group, same organisation, same quality of professional – but drastically different experiences depending on the manager.”
Another explained, “…getting that big picture and being included [by a manager] on those big decisions and big meetings, so that when you get tasked with a task that perhaps isn’t the best communicated, that you can make sense of it, because you have a picture…I have had really supportive managers who have helped with that.”
Conversely, the absence of strong or inconsistent managerial capability left many early career employees feeling exposed. When managers passed down pressure without explanation, set unclear or shifting expectations, offered inconsistent feedback, relied on generic advice, modelled overwork, or were difficult to access, participants reported a sharp rise in stress and the risk of burnout.
Frequent managerial changes were identified as an additional source of strain. Several participants described having multiple managers at once, sometimes resulting in competing demands and making it difficult to build trust or receive consistent guidance. As one participant put it, “I’ve had multiple new leaders over the last four years… you have to relearn how to work with a new manager every time – their expectations, how much information they want… it just adds stress.”
Strategies for change:
- Minimise unnecessary manager changes and ensure structured handovers where this does occur.
- In rotation programs, ensure there is a consistent point of contact (such as a coach or mentor), even if reporting lines change.
- Equip managers of early career employees with a clear understanding of effective leadership behaviours, as identified in the focus groups. This includes:
- Provide clarity, context, and prioritisation
- Offer constructive, specific feedback
- Recognise effort
- Encourage learning, including through making mistakes
- Grant appropriate autonomy.
Early Career Burnout is Predictable and Preventable: Here’s How to Tackle it Together
While those early in their careers are highly vulnerable to burnout, that doesn’t make it inevitable. The key is for young employees and organisational leaders to work together, to target burnout early at both an individual and a structural level.
Organisations can significantly reduce the risk by improving workload design, strengthening role clarity, investing in managerial capability and shaping cultural norms that support learning rather than perfectionism. When these foundations are in place, early career employees are far more likely to feel supported, valued, and equipped to grow sustainably.
Early career employees also have an important role to play. They can reduce their own risk of burnout by proactively building the skills that help them navigate career pressures — setting boundaries, seeking clarification early, and developing routines for managing competing demands. Over time, these behaviours help those early in their careers to build confidence, reduce cognitive load, and develop the coping tools that experienced employees come to rely on.
Together, these actions not only reduce the risk of burnout but also accelerate capability development and enable more sustainable, long-term career performance.
The Thriving from the Start Network will be joined by psychologist Penny Myerscough from Commonwealth Bank and Zainab Nayyar Khan from Mallesons, who will share real-world strategies to help set early career professionals up for sustainable work performance.
Secure your free ticket here.
