Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
With unemployment rates at an all time low, employers are coming under increasing pressure to attract, recruit and retain appropriate staff - enter the optimistic, confident and ambitious Generation Y.
Generation Y are career focused and know what they ideally want to achieve, in fact, a recent survey found that career was rated as the most important thing for the future, prioritised over health and other factors in their lives.
Candidates often receive more than one job offer when hunting for employment, making the competition for staff much stronger and leaving employers with a challenge to fill vacancies.
Managing Director of recruitment specialist Walker Technical Consultants, David Walker said that the skills shortage dominating the employment market calls for the need to understand tomorrow’s generation in order to take advantage of their developing skills.
“Generation Y know about the skills shortage development and realise that they have more options in the job market, giving them increased leverage in terms of benefits and work environment.”
“They will research your company and form their own opinions, so it is crucial that the messages you are sending out are positive,” Mr Walker said.
Statistics have shown that 72% of Generation Y will not apply for a role within an organisation if they do not believe in what it stands for and 42% would not accept a job if it did not provide perks.
“Recruitment agencies are as busy as ever working for both candidates and employers in order to match up the perfect employee with the perfect job and ultimately satisfy all parties involved,” he said.
Walker Technical Consultants hold alliances with accredited training programs to ensure the mentoring and development of candidates and address the skills shortage in the employment market.
Tags: Australia, Gen Y, Workplace
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Sunday, March 5th, 2006
Danielle Sacks has put her finger and the fingers of several others on the emerging culture clash with the employment of Generation Y in the United States. Her article, “Scenes from the Culture Clash” was published in Fast Company, Issue 102, January 2006, page 72.
Sacks explains how companies are just now waking up to the havoc that the newest generation of workers is causing in their offices. Her article begins the scenario in which parents turn up in the office to complain about the way their Millennial kids are being treated.
The latest generation to join the mix is disruptive not only because of its size but because of its attitudes. Speak to enough intergenerational experts who study such things (and we spoke to more than a dozen of them), and you begin to get the picture: Millennials aren’t interested in the financial success that drove the boomers or the independence that has marked the gen-Xers, but in careers that are personalized. They want educational opportunities in China and a chance to work in their companies’ R&D departments for six months.
“They have no expectation that the first place they work will at all be related to their career, so they’re willing to move around until they find a place that suits them,” says Dan Rasmus, who runs a workplace think tank for Microsoft.
Thanks to their overinvolved boomer parents, this cohort has been coddled and pumped up to believe they can achieve anything. Immersion in PCs, video games, email, the Internet, and cell phones for most of their lives has changed their thought patterns and may also have actually changed how their brains developed physiologically. These folks want feedback daily, not annually. And in case it’s not obvious, millennials are fearless and blunt. If they think they know a better way, they’ll tell you, regardless of your title.
The article is written for Baby Boomer and GenX employers, beginning with recognition of the stresses involved in cultural clashes. However Sacks, herself a Gen Xer, lays out a few ways through the conflict. She refers to the lessons learnt by 50, 40 and 30 something executives at seminars led by Lynne Lancaster of BridgeWorks.
Womble Carlyle, a legal firm, realised that young lawyers were walking out of traditional heavy work loads in search of work-life balance, flexible schedules, and philanthropic work. Womble formalized a part-time track, in which attorneys can work with supervisors to shape personalised schedules.
Deloitte & Touche USA, a large USA accounting and consulting firm, heard from its Gen Y workers that brutal audit schedules, in which teams had to camp out at client companies for weeks or months at a time, seemed superfluous in an age when client records are digitized. They felt they could get the same work done remotely. Deloitte’s clients told the firm that they didn’t care whether auditors were on-site or not, as long as the quality of the work didn’t suffer. After a successful test in its New York office in which employees had the choice to work off-site.
Tags: Gen Y, Workplace
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