Can Gen Y handle the downturn?
I was reading yet another account of the generation gap in the UK's Management Today magazine - see My Generation. I got the distinct impression that, as a boomer, I should be just a little bit intimidated by the outrageous demands of Gen Y (born 1978 - 1994) and adapting my approach accordingly. These are just some of the words that the article uses to characterise Gen Y: 'disruptive', 'divas', 'high maintenance', 'out for themselves', 'lacking in loyalty', 'thinking only of the short term and their place in it'.
What amused me is what these words conjured up - not a dynamic new generation, questioning old values and striving for positive change, but a bunch of kids who have been horrendously spoiled. And that's of course what they are, and the boomers have to take the blame for it.
As in all good children's novels, the spoiled, arrogant kids always get their come-uppance and real-life may be providing just such a possibility. The fact is that it is easy to be selfish and demanding when you yourself are in demand; when you're operating in a seller's market. For the past ten years, in the western world at least, there has been a shortage of talent and an abundance of riches, fuelled by ever-rising asset prices. If employers wanted to compete for skilled labour they had to eat humble pie and give job applicants anything they wanted. Come April 2008, the situation looks somewhat different: the boot is transferring very quickly to the other foot as recessionary pressures create a buyer's market in which employers will call the shots.
So how will Gen Y react to a shortfall in jobs, income and adulation? I'm not sure it's so difficult to envisage: just like those spoilt kids who found they couldn't always get what they wanted, you first try sulks and tantrums and, when they don't work, you knuckle down to see out the hard times. Just like all preceding generations.
posted by Clive Shepherd @ 3:51 PM #
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Not being British, perhaps it's a bit of a different picture across the pond. In the US, the divorce rate for the parents of GenY is above 50%. Their parents, mostly of the Boomer set, are of a generation replete with examples of the worst kinds of greed and corruption. The guys who ran Enron to the ground? They were Boomers, not GenY. The guys waging this unconscionable war in Iraq? They're boomers, by and large -- not GenY. The CEOs of these insanely large lending firms that are foisting a US Mortgage crisis on the global economy? They're also boomers. This broad brush doesn't paint the whole picture of baby boomers, but let us acknowledge reality: raised in the 80s and 90s where toys, gadgets and items of commerce often made up for the inability to spend time with your kids... well, GenY is what the boomers made of them. You have a generation where most kids did not come from the "nuclear" family mold and were among the first generation to truly have to take care of themselves as their parents had to work more and more.
So when you have an entire generation who have been raised by a generation that appears to have spent much of its integrity in the late 60s, worked insanely hard, got a little drunk on the prosperity handed down to them by their parents and grown fat on the interest earned in various power and money grabs (junk bonds, savings and loan scandals, risky mortgage schemes...) why shouldn't GenY want more? Why shouldn't they expect more? Not just "more" in terms of treasure or comforts -- but more out of themselves? Society has let the bar drop so low that what seems to me as such simple demands as respect, dignity and self-worth pass now as arrogance.
That is just sad.
I'm just a couple of years too old to be in GenY by most calculations, but GenY and I have something in common: for the first time in living history, we are inheriting a world that has dimmer prospects for the future than the current state -- that's a marked difference from the world and workplace people born in the 50s and 60s inherited.
You note how GenY will have to "you knuckle down to see out the hard times. Just like all preceding generations." In the States, the parents of GenY might say the same thing.
I think GenY would really be satisfied with a mea culpa from the baby boomers. For all the whining and moaning I read about how GenY is so impetuous and demanding, it's the greed of baby boomers in positions of wealth and power that has made April 2008 so starkly different than April 2007 or April 2006.
I apologize, Mr. Shepherd. I'm a fan of yours and a subscriber to the blog, and I try to contain my wont to rant to my own blog(s). One would be in redress to discuss the impetuousness of GenY and not look to the tree the apples fall from.
We've been interviewing for entry-level designers and developers here, have made reasonable offers by today's market standards for said position and been turned down by young candidates (right out of college with little to no experience) who wanted twice the money. This has happened more than once. I have wondered if three months out now they wished they had made different decisions...
Fabulous response Aaron and very thought provoking. Yes the boomers have much to feel guilty about. We were perhaps the first generation in history who never really had it tough, at least in the UK - no major wars, relative peace and prosperity, the removal of many of the old constraints on behaviour. We've lived it up without ever really understanding the enormous sacrifices made by previous generations. And we are the main beneficiaries of high property prices and generous pensions - our children may still be working at 70. What could be seen as our selfishness in spending our time and money on ourselves rather than bringing up the required quota of children needed to maintain the population, means that in Europe at least, there will be no money to pay for our children's pensions without mass immigration. Yes, I suppose Gen Y could just be copying us. The more I read of the enormous suffering that took place in the middle of the 20th century, the more I realise that we just don't know we're born.
Clive - is your post a wind-up? Seriously? Is that how you see people born after 1978?
I've re-read your post twice to look for signs of irony or sarcasm, hoping upon hope that I have misunderstood you.
If your post is reflective of how you see the current group of people entering the workplace, I seriously pity you. Your blanket description of an entire generation as 'spoiled' and 'arrogant' tells us a great deal more about the attitude of your generation than those about whom you are speaking.
Furthermore, your apparently gleeful reportage of these Gen Y'ers difficulties during a time of economic hardship seems as though it's bordering on scrooge-like.
If that's your attitude to the 'demands' of the current generation (that we have the temerity to ask for things our way and not yours) then quite frankly you are beyond your sell-by-date.
Very, very shabby.
Damien's comment is fair but I must point out that I am almost incapable of writing without irony and this post was a bit of a wind up, responding to the stereotype painted in a UK magazine article, not my experience of real people. I'm sorry if, in spite of your re-reading you didn't get my angle.
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