The Casino Manager Has Not Changed Since 1998. The People He Manages Have

I have been training casino professionals for a long time now, and every course starts more or less the same. A room full of managers, most of them my age, and at some point during the first coffee break, somebody says: “The young ones are impossible.” Nods around the table. A story about a 26-year-old who left after eleven months. Another about one who asked for a development plan in the first week. Everybody laughs.

I used to laugh too. I don’t anymore, because I have started to notice who is telling the story. It is always us, Gen X. The people who built this industry in the 2000s, and who manage exactly the way we were managed. Which was, let’s be honest, not managed at all. You were thrown in, you swam, or you sank, and if you sank, that was your character.

That approach produced a generation of very resilient casino professionals. It also produced managers who have never learned anything else, and who now find the people they are hiring “impossible” because those people want something we were never given and have never given.

I know what that something is, because I live with two of them. My kids are Gen Z. They are not lazy, they are not fragile, and they are not impossible. They are different, in ways that are measurable, and the measurements are not flattering to us.

Deloitte has asked more than 22,000 Gen Z and millennial employees in 44 countries what they want from work. The 2026 edition is blunt: they prioritise stability, skills and well-being over fast advancement, and they say their managers are missing the mark, because what they want is guidance, inspiration and mentorship, not somebody supervising their daily task list.

Read that again from the perspective of a casino manager. Mentorship. Guidance. Inspiration. When did any of us get that? When did any of us learn to give it? We got a target, a budget and a slap on the back at the Christmas party. And then we sit at the coffee break and wonder why the CRM specialist left for a fintech that offered a development plan.

Meanwhile the supply side is not getting easier. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 survey of 39,000 employers in 41 countries found 72% cannot find the talent they need. And our industry is not exactly the first choice for a bright graduate. We are gambling. Their parents have opinions. Their friends have opinions. If we then also offer them a management style from 1998, why on earth would they come? And more importantly, why would they stay?

Here is the part I find genuinely uncomfortable. For years I have been saying that casinos, land-based and online, have barely changed in twenty years. Same interface, same onboarding, same emails, same bonuses. Thirteen in a dozen, as we say in Dutch. I have said this about the product many times. I have not said it enough about the management, and it is exactly the same story. We do tomorrow what we did last year, because we have always done it that way, and we call it experience.

Cinemas do not look like cinemas of the eighties. Restaurants change their concept. Amusement parks rebuild their rides. But the casino manager? Same slap on the back. Same “when I was your age.” Same surprise when the young talent leaves.

And I want to be careful here, because the easy conclusion is that the industry needs to be softer, and that is not what the data says. Gen Z is ambitious. They want to learn and they want to progress. What they will not do is wait five years for someone to notice them, and they will not accept “figure it out yourself” as a management philosophy. That is not a weakness. That is a reasonable expectation that we, their managers, happen to be very badly equipped to meet.

So the question for the Gen X manager, myself included, is not whether the young ones are impossible. It is whether we are willing to learn a few things we thought we were too senior to need. Because they are not coming round to our way. We built an industry on knowing what people want and giving it to them. It would be strange if we applied that to every customer and to none of our colleagues.

Which things exactly we need to learn is what I will be talking about at the Acceler8 Lab at SBC Summit Lisbon, on Day 2, 30 September at 12:00, at the GR8_TECH stand. It will be uncomfortable. That is the point. The last time a dominant species decided it did not need to adapt, it did not end well.