Winston-Salem Business Magazine - January 2008 - (Page 15) They’re young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office or listen to iPods at their desk. They want to work, but they don’t want work to be their life. T This is Generation Y, a force of as many as 70 million, and the first wave is just now embarking on their careers — taking their place in an increasingly multigenerational workplace. Get ready, because this generation — whose members have not yet hit 30 — is different from any that have come before, according to researchers and authors. Who is Gen Y? Generation Y, born between 1977 and 1995, may well be on its way to becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in our nation’s history — and for very good reasons. They took their baby steps during our first true entrepreneurial decade, the 1980s; watched their parents “restructured” out of what were once lifetime corporate jobs; saw barriers to entry collapse as technology democratized the business start-up process; enrolled in newly-minted college entrepreneurship programs, which have increased seven-fold in the past six years. Effect on workforce Under the narrow definition, as they take their first jobs, Gen Y would be the fastest-growing segment of the workforce — growing from 14% of the workforce to 21% over the past four years to nearly 32 million workers. About Gen Y workers • High expectations of self: They aim to work faster and better than other workers. • High expectations of employers: They want fair and direct managers who are highly engaged in their professional development. • Ongoing learning: They seek out creative challenges and view colleagues as vast resources from whom to gain knowledge. • Immediate responsibility: They want to make an important impact on Day 1. • Goal-oriented: They want small goals with tight deadlines so they can build up ownership of tasks. This age group is moving into the labor force during a time of major demographic change, as companies around the USA face an aging workforce. Sixty-year-olds are working beside 20-year-olds. Freshly minted college graduates are overseeing employees old enough to be their parents. And new job entrants are changing careers faster than college students change their majors, creating frustration for employers struggling to retain and recruit talented highperformers. Unlike the generations that have gone before them, Gen Y has been pampered, nurtured and programmed with a slew of activities since they were toddlers, meaning they are both high-performance and highmaintenance, Tulgan says. They also believe in their own worth. “Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional commandand-control type of management still popular in much of today’s workforce,” says 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 50year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now.’ “ That speak-your-mind philosophy makes sense to Katie Patterson, an assistant account executive at Edelman Public Relations in Atlanta. The 23-year-old, who hails from Iowa and now lives with two roommates in a town home, likes to collaborate with others, and says many of her friends want to run their own businesses so they can be independent. “We are willing and not afraid to challenge the status quo,” she says. “An environment where creativity and independent thinking are looked upon as a positive is appealing to people my age. We’re very independent and tech savvy.” A great deal is known about Gen Y They have financial smarts. After witnessing the financial insecurity that beset earlier generations stung by layoffs and the dot-com bust, today’s newest entrants into the workforce are generally savvy when it comes to money and savings. They care about such benefits as 401(k) retirement plans. Thirty-seven percent of Gen Yers expect to start saving for retirement before they reach 25, with 46% of those already working indicating so, according to a September survey by Purchase, N.Y.-based Diversified WINSTON-SALEM BUSINESS | 15
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