In the spring of 2006 the youth of France took to the streets in the country’s largest protests since 1968. The demonstrations concerned a new employment contract law that opponents said would contribute to précarité – a pervasive sense of risk and uncertainty over future employment and material wellbeing. With youth unemployment then at a scandalising 23%, the young people of France were calling on the government to take action.

Fast forward to 2014. Youth unemployment in France is at 25%, and the government is doing what it can to help. But you don’t see the youth descending into the streets en masse to protest against the existential condition of risk. Having witnessed the financial crisis of 2008, the ensuing global recession and the general failure of governments and institutions everywhere to look out for them, today’s youth view risk simply as a fact of life, to be tolerated or even embraced.

To explore why this change is happening now, Protein conducted the Risk Survey at the end of last year, and found that millennials around the world are taking matters into their own hands and, in the process, reinventing work as we know it. The economic shift has coincided with shifts in values and technology, leading more millennials to spurn traditional jobs, take risks and make great leaps to start entirely new forms of career paths.