Generation’s 2025 Annual Impact Report marks another milestone in a journey that keeps compounding: more graduates, more wages, and deepening proof that employment that lasts changes everything.

It is one thing to place someone in a job. It is another to follow them through years of employment, to watch a family’s circumstances change, to ask — and answer — whether the impact holds. That is the question Generation has built its model around, and the 2025 Annual Impact Report is its most comprehensive answer yet. Across 155,000 graduates in 17 countries and years of deepening impact data, the trajectory is clear. As of today, those graduates have earned more than $2.5 billion working with 24,000-plus employer partners.

A decade of evidence

The 2025 Annual Impact Report opens with a statistic that frames everything that follows: 90 percent of Generation’s learners are unemployed when they join. Within six months of completing the program, 83 percent are in jobs. And the results last: 76 percent of alumni remain employed two to five years post-graduation, with 73 percent earning a living wage or above. 

The living wage data sharpens the economic mobility story further. Before Generation, only 4.5 percent of employed alumni in lower-middle-income countries were earning above a living wage. Two to five years post-graduation, that figure stands at 92 percent. In upper-middle income countries, the shift is from 10 to 85 percent. 

Impact that multiplies

The stability radiates beyond the graduate. The share of alumni holding a college degree has grown from 26 percent pre-Generation to 49 percent post-graduation. In households with children, 40 percent of alumni are paying for their children’s education. Across upper-middle and high-income countries, nearly half of alumni have built family savings for the first time. These numbers come to life in the stories alumni share. Codie, a graduate from the UK who transitioned out of benefits dependency through Generation’s program, put it simply: “My first wage was double what I received on benefits. I’m now able to start saving for my child’s future. I finally feel like I’m building something for myself and my child.”

This is the intergenerational dimension of Generation’s model, the mechanism by which a six-to-sixteen-week program produces change that reaches the next generation. 89 percent of alumni feel confident about their ability to achieve their professional goals, and 80 percent want to give something back. The alumni community itself has become a reinforcing asset: a network of mentors, repeat hires, and advocates who sustain the ecosystem that produced them. Independent evaluations put the return on investment at 3 to 7 times against counterfactuals, with graduates earning 6 to 22 times more income over five years compared to their situation before enrolling.

Why this moment demands a different kind of investment

The urgency behind Generation’s work is structural. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39 percent of workers’ core skills will be transformed or become obsolete between 2025 and 2030. McKinsey Global Institute research finds that up to 12 million occupational transitions may be required in Europe alone by 2030—double the pre-pandemic pace. AI is compressing the timeline for workforce adaptation from years to months. And regardless of what the future holds for jobs, we know that people will need to be able to train and shift rapidly to meet the needs of a changing market.

“Despite tens of billions of dollars spent annually by public and social sectors across the world to prepare unemployed youth for workforce entry, employment rates are often low. Changing this disappointing dynamic requires restructuring vocational and workforce programming to focus on employment, not just training alone.”– Mona Mourshed, Global CEO, Generation 

Generation’s answer is a seven-step methodology that goes beyond curriculum to confirmed job vacancies from employers. It delivers technical training alongside behavioral skills and mindset development, provides social supports through the program, and stays engaged with graduates on the job and within a growing alumni community. Longitudinal outcome tracking at three months, six months, one year, and annually through year five produces the kind of evidence that makes durable impact measurable.

That graduates are navigating this disruption successfully is borne out by Generation’s own research. The AI at Work report found that 65 percent of graduates are already using AI in their roles, with 94 percent reporting it has improved their ability to do their job. Entry-level workers in diverse economies, many of whom entered the workforce with no prior training, are not being left behind. They are adapting and doing so faster than the broader debate assumes.

Building on proof

Generation’s 2025–2030 strategy targets 400,000 to 500,000 cumulative learners, enabling them and up to 750,000 family members to achieve upward economic mobility, with particular focus on Africa and Latin America where the scale of the employment gap is largest. All programs remain free to learners

These individual results are the core of Generation’s impact, but they are not the end of it. Moving beyond the individual, Generation seeks to change the system that underlies opportunity for everyone. That means deepening work with national and state governments and other key system players, embedding its methodology into public workforce infrastructure to extend reach beyond what philanthropy alone can fund. At the same time, Generation is investing in field-level change as an inaugural member of The Durability Collective—a global community of funders, practitioners, and researchers building shared infrastructure for long-term social impact measurement. The Collective’s work includes Durability Academy, research partnerships, and a variety of public content and events, all aimed at making multi-year outcome tracking the norm.

What the last decade of data ultimately shows is that the return on investment in Generation’s model does not peak at placement. It accumulates in savings built, in school fees paid, in healthcare accessed, in college degrees earned, in the 80 percent of alumni who want to give something back. That is what durable change looks like at scale, and it is what the next phase of investment can build on.