Is a age that is both full of, and devoid of opportunities. I feel like being a adult is just lying about how much you have your shit together to people who also lie about having their shit together.
After we got out of college, we are just going to sit in front of a computer like the generations before us for the rest of our life, with the only difference of be paided less then them. I don't want to be like this. I want my life to be more then this. I want to go out explore and change the world.
When we gen z first comes to high school the world seems full of opportunities, we imagine us achieving great things, but not one of us could have imagined the entire generation having a mid-life crisis at the age of 18.
To all the Gen Z, and in the future, Gen Alpha. Welcome to the 2020s, welcome to late stage captalism.
My kid's a millennial and graduated college in 2018... Here's the dirty little secret... Your life depends on what you put into it. Nobody just just going to hand you anything, you have to put in the work.
I tried to make it easy for him, I paid his way through college so he got a CS degree with no debt, but he worked for that degree, and the connections he made led to his first job at Intel, his second job at Oracle, and now, at the age of 28, he's out there doing the super spooky AI stuff, and presenting papers at conferences.
Not to belittle you kid's efforts, it's a great feat they've achieved, but it sounds like survivorship bias. You can do everything right and still fail. Being in the right place at the right time and having the right connections matter.
That last statement is absolutely true. My first 5-6 years in IT I kind of languished, because there were very few people around me that made an effort or pushed me to get better or just explained stuff to me. Then I got a call from a recruiter for a system engineer position. While I didn't get that job, it did lead me to quit my job to go find something better. I then did find an IT system engineer job where I had a great mentor, support and incentives to get IT certificates. I wasn't there for long due to personal circumstances, but that really launched my career and I've been getting better and higher paid jobs since.
Your manager can go suck a dick. They are absolutely worth it and worth the out of pocket expense for the exam. The long term benefits (it looks very good on a cv) are absolutely beneficial to your career, not to mention you will learn relevant stuff in the process.