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After spending a solid hour or so immersed in Thesis Land, I’m feeling pretty satisfied with the intro paragraph for Gen Y itself. After over a year of research, it feels pretty ridiculous to be putting this sort of an introduciton together. It’s sort of like a nuclear physicist mapping the chemical bonds for baking soda and vinegar.
Okay, you’re right: this makes me sound pretentious and bitchy, and being a self-proclaimed expert is one of the single most obnoxious things on the Internet.
In any case, here’s my first attempt and putting together a general description of Gen Y and what might make us tick. Suggestions WELCOME!
One of Glamour magazine’s ten young women to watch in back in 2000 - an army sergeant and nuclear engineering student - said in her interview that, “All ten of us are trying to find this altered reality, or this utopia, or we’re trying to change the world.” Gen Y isn’t the first generation to desire change in the world, but we are arguably the first ones to truly believe in limitless potential in the modern workplace. According to Smola and Sutton’s study, Gen X believes that “working hard makes one a better person” and Boomers feel that “work should be one of the most important parts of a person’s life.” Gwendy Donaker, a recent graduate from Pomona College who was interviewed for a BusinessWeek feature, explained her refusal of an employment offer with a successful consulting firm: “I soon realized that it just wasn’t worth sacrificing two years working so hard on issues I don’t care about just so the firm could pay me to go to B[usiness] school.” In other words, Gen Y would likely say that, “Work isn’t worth doing unless it will make the world a better place.”
The reaction from employers regarding the work attitudes of Gen Y have been swift and consistent. First, we’re too contrary: “Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today’s workforce,” according to Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York. “They’ve grown up questioning their parents, and now they’re questioning their employers. They don’t know how to shut up, which is great, but that’s aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now.’” Gen Y has been shaped by a high degree of transparency in popular culture. Just a cursory look at the images that have shaped Gen Y reveals American Idol contestants crooning their way from obscurity to stardom, dysfunctional Real World cast members featured on the silver screen, 16-year-old filmmakers, and 15-year-old Disney superstars. Success is no longer a far and distant goal separated by years of nose-to-the-grindstone work: it’s ripe for the taking as fast as a resourceful person can get to harvest (not that Gen Y would know a hard day’s work in the fields anyway, right?).
Pallavi Gogol of BusinessWeek reported that, “With both parents working and more disposable income than previous generations, Gen Y has often been branded as an overindulged, spoiled, and disengaged group that looks at the world through a prism of self interest.” Just as Gen Y lives by our favorite member brands, so are we branded by our behavior and attitudes in the workplace. Perceptions will always trump reality, and no contradictory statistics regarding the work ethic of Gen Yers could ever change the mind of a Gen X manager with a bad Y taste left in her mouth. A popular blog called Gen X Speaks to Gen Y cites a fashion retail manager’s experience with Gen Y employees: “This generation known as Gen Y may be smarter but they do not know how to work in a business atmosphere. I truly believe that unless they are given a syllabus or specific instructions, this generation would not know to wipe their butts.” [BLOGGER'S NOTE: We have the same WordPress theme...coincidence?] Though not necessarily an expert opinion, this manager’s words are certainly corroborated by the experience of others (and as stated earlier, perceived laziness will always put a damper on actual hard work).
Hm...I must be Gen Y then, birth certificate be damned! I don't agree that resistance to the command-and-control workplace or desertion of the attitude that "work" (any work, with or without a purpose or meaningful result) is "good for you."
I don't think these are "Gen Y" attitudes. I think the culture in general has changed, and the younger generation is just going with the flow. Many Boomers and Xers are, too; the people lodging complaints sound scared and stuck.
Earlier generations before Gen Y had the same "So what?" mentality - they just expressed it in different avenues, particularly in society. The major changes that took place in the United States have been a resistance against the norm. Gen Y just happens to be taking that mentality to the workplace, eliminating the archaic procedures which hinder progress toward the ultimate goal.
I never thought that asking why was a negative and the more I read about the generational gaps, there seems to be this mentality. Do all generations feel this way? Is it even a generational thing?
“This generation known as Gen Y may be smarter but they do not know how to work in a business atmosphere. I truly believe that unless they are given a syllabus or specific instructions, this generation would not know to wipe their butts."
And this is why a mentor is vital. 95% of the conventional wisdom, accumulated knowledge, and methods of business are not written down, and perhaps never will be.
I would be curious as to the time frame of questions asked by Somola and Sutton to Gen X and the Boomers in regards to their attitudes of work. They may not represent as much generational differences as attitudinal differences based on where they happen to be in life. People looking at retirement, those with families, mortgages, ect. may have different perspectives. The young generations of their times all want to change the world, and many make marvelous strides in doing so, but each generation goes through it's own varied stages of growth and development and the gen y of today will not be the gen y of 20 years from now or 40 years from now.
"Boomer," "Gen X," and "Gen Y" are just marketing terms created by salespeople who would like their statements to be meaningful. They claim that they are based on statistics, a branch of mathematics that is greatly abused. Movie stars and idols have been around since the fifties, and I don't see the current ones as being much different. I've seen the work attitudes described as belonging to Gen Y in boomers too. Solomon saw some of what is going on here thousands of years ago when he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. Many nations have risen and fallen. Nixon took us off the gold standard, and our population have more increasingly turned toward socialism to make us a better society. It is not generations that divide us but attitudes toward work that come from fewer farms, more welfare households, and government programs that encourage people to not work. A favorite saying of mine is that it is not what you get by working, but what you become by it that matters.
But what do I know? Back to my TV I go.
I agree with most of what you had to say but your main point about how someone turned down a very solid job offer because “Work isn’t worth doing unless it will make the world a better place” is a very scary thought. I actually wrote about this in my last blog post about how saying that you want "to change the world" and "make the world a better place" are worthless words unless you do something about it. And the problem is that most gen yers don't, or at least haven't, done anything about it. Thoughts like changing the world, being a celebrity, making millions quickly, etc, have seemed to inflate our egos to the point that great opportunities (i.e. a good job) are overlooked. If we're able to overlook those opportunities for better ones, than great, but if there's no tangible solution to "change the world", then overlooking those opportunities is just irrational and will come back to hurt our society greatly.
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