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We’ve all seen articles about how to blend people into the workforce and how to “deal” with Generation Y. This strikes me as a bit odd (and at worst insulting). We have had access to more resources, education and information then any previous generation. We are expected to have cured cancer, volunteered, played three sports, and helped the less fortunate…merely for entrance into a top 20 school.
Oh, and to graduate we have to fork over the equivalent of $40,000+ per year. So, needless to say the economic reality of accepting a $30,000 a year position is kind of depressing.
I know that economic realities make this starting salary a necessity. You need entry level workers and new ideas to spur your company forward. However, ideas are cheap. Execution and ability to create effective strategies are what makes a company stronger.
Now, this is not the reality at every company — many companies have embraced this new wave of workers and have done their best to facilitate growth and development.
This article is not for those companies. I respect and applaud the efforts of innovation, new ways of thinking, and breakdown of certain destructive corporate hierarchies. However, most of the time these companies are very new or come from a start up culture. Thus the vast majority of companies hold true to the old guard.
How to keep your corporate culture intact:
This article was obviously written with a heavy dose of sarcasm. However, a lot of these “worst” practices are simply a reality of the current corporate world. The reality is slowly changing however. Zappos is an example of a corporation where initiative is encouraged and personality is rewarded. Other companies are following this model with a great deal of success. Give us a shot, a tiny bit of backing and guidance. You will be amazed at what ends up being created.
"Execution and ability to create effective strategies are what makes a company stronger."
I agree but those old school companies that have been in business for 50 years have had to execute and create effective strategy in order to survive. Seems like they understand things change. The question is, what execution and effective strategy has Gen Y shown when entering the workforce? And how do you propose being effective in converting a culture when you can't even deal with minor "inconveniences" like a 9-5 schedule? You can't expect one party to bend all of the way for you.
Before a bunch of people go nuts, I am generalizing about Gen Y just as much as the author here so make sure to be consistent in your attacks.
@Lance Your comment is dead on and right.
Old companies like GE still bring in huge profits and run multi-billion dollar Supply chains. Yeah, Twitter and Digg make the Y-gen's head spin but they are not the ones bringing clean power, water and fuel to our daily lives.
Gen-Y faces no different challenges than previous generations, so its no excuse for us to complain and make excuses to try not to fit-in.
If I am hiring manager and I have 50 resumes, would I choose someone who had a well written concise good resume or someone who wrote "I am gr8 at tweeting" as his resume title and has 800 friends on Facebook?
9-5 exists the primary reason to keep team members in the office at same time so that people can execute without waiting for their team members to finally show up. Even startups have core team hours ... may be it is 2 PM - midnight ... but most teams have core hours.
@Lance I recommend reading the article a bit closer before going off on a rant about 9-5. I don't stop working...ever. I try to occasionally, but then I go back to doing so. I have actually been told to stop working so much at a previous job...seriously. I don't care when the core hours are, I'm going to continue to work beyond them on a regular basis. I just think that my best work often comes at odd hours.
@Vivek Great a GE comparison to Social Media? Not exactly a fair comparison. One company has been in existence since the early 1900's and the other got its start in 2004. Neither company (Digg or Twitter) is being run with long term stability in mind. Both are start ups trying to get bought out (Twitter doesn't even have a business plan). I'm sorry that I don't have a "concise good resume" but guess what: I don't have "I am gr8 at tweeting" either.
Stop demeaning something you really don't understand. Social media to me is a marketing/communications platform that is on the level of TV in its infancy. If your thinking is correct, then I'd suggest sticking to the yellow pages for that 18-34 year old demographic. I'm sure you will do great.
Unfortunately this article screams the worst qualities of Gen Y: entitlement. Yes, we all competed to the limit in order to get into the best college. That doesn't make us great people, or better for work, it meant we were good at jumping through the hoops to get into college.
Just because [some of us] forked over 40k a year for college, does NOT mean we are owed anything for it. Many times, our college education was not worth this much. But we were either fooled, didn't know any better, or as in this case STILL don't know any better.
Get a job you were qualified to do before college? Duh! Going to college is a hoop you jump through to get that first job. But it's pretty likely (unless you majored in Engineering, where is JRandom at...) that your first job and the first couple years (or maybe your whole job) will not be based on what you learned in college. They want to see that you can work hard and learn, and finishing a college degree generally means you have some of these qualities.
Look only at your resume? Yes! Why would your facebook or your tweeting or your "public branding" make you a better employee? If they have to guess, than it's not relevant. If you can't fit it into your resume, or cover letter, or a portfolio and it's not relevant to how you would succeed for them or save them money than they don't care.
I laugh at how many young Gen Y employees balk at entry level salaries in the 30k range. Really, unless you got a specialized degree (engineering, programming, law) you are at age 22 a generalist with probably no experience. 30k is a lot more than MANY people in this country make and you can get that hard working administrative assistant with 15 years experience but no degree would have loved to have started out with a 30k a year salary just for being you.
I say all this as a Gen Y myself. I wasn't any better than anyone else, but a few years of particularly harsh corporate reality has set in and taught me I must work for what I earn. When I see a young, fresh face like myself I wonder if a few years will turn them into me, or if corporate america will begin to cater to that sense of entitlement as more Gen Y swamps the workplace. I hope it is the former, we could do with a little humility, it really does make your life happier when you can be satisfied with earning what you have and working hard for what you want.
@Stuart - totally agreed with your OP and follow up comments.
I'm very sensitive to the "entitled" complaint a lot of Gen Yers get, but your post comes from a realistic perspective. I don't truly know anyone fresh out of college demanding a corner office, a cushy salary and nothing but the most attractive projects all day long. Really, Gen Y DOES understand the concept of paying dues.
But that might be the heart of the disconnect between Gen Y and the hiring powers that be.
We don't look at it as paying dues, we look at it as the first step in a life long process of learning, building a network and skilling up. There's a big difference between a job where you get coffee, but a colleague/boss takes you under their wing, feeds you tasks and information as responsibility is proven and you're genuinely listened to, and a job where you just get coffee. That's borderline demeaning, and to be blunt, lazy ineffective management that's become a staple of the corporate world.
Speaking of the corporate world, and the follow up comments that basically argued, "Company X has been in business 50 years - they must be doing something right!". All I have to say is so had Enron, AIG, Bear Stern, Circuit City, Worldcom and just about every major media conglomerate.
Maybe, an infusion of fresh blood that's familiar with the cultural landscape is worth something? Or at least not approaching it with a a "fit it for fuck off" attitude.
That said, word of advice Stuart. If you don't want snarky comment replies, don't construct your posts dripping with sarcasm. It breeds trolls.
AIG, Circuit City and others are wrong? Seriously! I don't know about many things in life but I know something about bodybuilding and building a company. Anybody who has better defined muscle structure than me or running a bigger and successful business than mine deserves my respect because I know how much effort, commitment, dedication and strategy it takes to achieve it.
Gen-Y (and yes, I am a member of it), please stop asking for entitlement. It takes a long while to become an expert in a field. Don't misuse this term and understand that patience is the key to a good long term career.
On one hand, there does seem to be a sense of entitlement from Gen Y. The very suggestion that employees are telling employers how to hire them is a form of arrogance - unless that employee is a superstar with every major company clamouring to hire them.
On the other hand, if business never evolved, we would still be digging cow shit for our feudal lords without pay. And those Old School companies do seem to be facing a few problems...
Honestly, any Gen Y person who feels a sense of entitlement will find that they have to put in the grunt work in order to get ahead. I can tell you that in my lab, the people who are here last every night and in on weekends are the technicians a year or two out of those expensive colleges, not the doctorates. You have to be able to look at the whole picture - not just what's on the resume - in order to understand how valuable this potential employee can be for your company, and how invested they are into the field already. Like every generation before us, Gen Y-ers have a lot of great ideas, and a lot of energy to implement them. It's short-sighted and detrimental for any company to brush off a potential employee because of their age and time out of college.
@Miles Entitlement? That's b.s., I'm not entitled to anything and I know it. However, does that make me willing to accept things that I view as backwards with a mob mentality? Heck no.
I didn't spend 40k to go to college, I got a scholarship and worked every summer doing HVAC or at the town dump. Thus I left school without having completed a single internship. I couldn't afford to not get paid so I actually WORKED all summer.
Drawing from those experiences I went and worked a corporate job. I worked my ass off and got little in return. Now I'm consulting in marketing/pr with a focus in social media and love every minute of it.
My point is this: I'll stick with people who actually have innovative ideas. It doesn't matter what generation they are from, it's the culture of the company that matters to me.
I'm advocating a meritocracy which corporation hierarchies currently prevent.
I think when you are graduating from college and getting your career started, you need to go through the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Sadness, Acceptance, Moving on.
You spend a lot of time, money, and energy on your education. And it's wonderful. And it's this great experience you take with you. And then you get out and the workforce kind of sucks. It sucks now. It sucked 10 years ago. It always has. Especially when you're getting started.
A lot of Millennials seem to be at that angry stage. I know it well, because I spent three years there. But I can tell you from experience, when you let go of what was supposed to be, how it is supposed to happen, things get a lot better.
"Oh, and to graduate we have to fork over the equivalent of $40,000+ per year."
"I didn't spend 40k to go to college, I got a scholarship and worked every summer doing HVAC or at the town dump. Thus I left school without having completed a single internship. I couldn't afford to not get paid so I actually WORKED all summer."
So I suppose by "have to" you meant, other people did so you think your starting salary should be higher. I sympathize with not getting an internship because you had to work for pay. Some fields, internships pay, and in others (i.e., marketing) they do not, because those are lower paying fields in general. You do not go into marketing expecting a huge salary right away. Now, the advantage YOU had in working through college (and getting a scholarship) was no student debt. So be thankful.
America is, unfortunately, not a meritocracy. But if you've found a company that runs the way you want it to, why complain about how other people run their companies? If it isn't the economically viable and most successful option, it will fail. Capitalism at its best, the market decides, and not everything has to run like you think it should.
I'm with Lance.
I know (and employ) many smart, motivated Generation Y people and none of them have the attitude that they expect to dictate the term of their employment. They understand that many workplaces have the need for some core business hours (not all workplaces, of course, but many), and they know that they'll need to prove themselves (with something more than a college degree, expensive or not) before they're given real responsibility. They get that it's reasonable in many jobs (again, not all but many) for an employer to prefer that staffers not be Facebooking at the same time as they're doing work that requires deep concentration to do well.
They're smart and they're reasonable, and I'm not sure this article represents them.
I am Gen X (40) and I still find comments from Gen Y interesting. First, not all work is glamorous. Some of it is grunt work. You will have to do this at almost every stage of your career. However, the first way to alienate everyone you work with is to complain about having to do it. They did it, now it is your turn. By doing it coworkers will see you are competent and then you can parlay that into bigger ideas. A resume is a snapshot of you. If you can't do that effectively, you can't work for me. I don't care about your web presence, your personal branding or that you can simultaneously Tweet and look at your Facebook/Myspace page. If you can't tell me about you, using good grammar and make it a good read...how will you be effective in an office environment? Next, get over yourself. If all Gen Ys are so highly effective then it doesn't matter which one gets the job. Right? If everyone is special, then no one is. Remember that. The largest high school graduating class in US history is about to enter college. Are they going to dictate how you hire them in about 5-6 years? I'm going to let you in on a little secret. People like to think that they are irreplaceable. If they leave, the company will fall apart. We aren't, you're not and it won't. If you don't like my hiring practices or the next company's hiring practices...who cares? You need to fight from the inside to make change. That means you have to dance through hoops. Lastly, all Gen Y people will eventually Tweet themselves out. Just my opinion but as you get older and have families you will have less time and begin to care less about this stuff. Also, in a few years when you get older you'll start to look like these ridiculous middle age "experts" who are telling me about personal branding, and how important networking is. That is not new. As an example Tony Robbins was talking about personal branding in 1992. Now Dan Schwabel is the "expert" on the subject. He is one of many voices for his generation. That being said his days are numbered. Just ask Tony. Lastly, your Generation in my opinion is the most materialistic generation. You start on 3rd base and think you hit a triple. You said it in yourself, "accepting a $30000/yr salary is depressing." You want it all now, and are each so desperate to be told what a great job you are doing. As a owner/manager I find it very easy to manage your generation. I ask for volunteers on a task. Every Gen Y eagerly asks to do it. Then I assign the task to a group. I tell them what I want, when i need it and how to do it. A couple days into the project I ask the group if they have any suggestions on how to improve it. Now usually someone will come up with a good idea (but I omitted this from the original outline, so when they come up with it they think they are being original and I give them credit). Very rarely does anyone come up with something completely out of left field that has never been tried before. When the project is done, I tell everyone what a good job they did. I ask if they think there is anything they think that could have been done differently etc. Now don't get me wrong. I value the input of all members, and am genuine in wanting to see them succeed. But you are all fighting for the same brass ring, and in that sense you are like everyone before you and everyone after you. So instead of telling me how to hire you, why don't you explain to me why I should hire YOU?
Stop using your companies pre-printed thank you notes. Hand write a thank you note! Hand writing is much more personal and it shows you care. More...
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