Recent research indicates that 20-somethings expect a great deal of job flexibility (leeway in how, when and where work gets done) and career flexibility (freedom to manage career advancement).

While some critics feel millennials are being unrealistic in their expectations of flexibility, Cali Williams Yost at Fast Company argues that these expectations have arisen out of sheer necessity.

Yost points out that in the last few decades, technology and globalization have decimated the boundaries between job and personal life and have “rendered the promise of the full-time job with benefits obsolete….The steady, ever-increasing paycheck deposited into your bank account every other week has given way to a more inconsistent, unpredictable, multi-stream, project-based cash flow.”

She reasons that millennials’ expectations of increased autonomy and job flexibility align with this new “dynamic, free agent existence.”

Read more from Yost on the Fast Company Expert Blog.

What have you found most challenging about adapting to today’s dynamic, free-agent job market? Tell us in the comment section below.