Industrial Distribution

Jack Keough

Generation Yers: A new employment problem
May 21, 2007

Managers may have thought they had problems dealing with Generation X. But the new kids on the block, Generation Y, seem to be a lot more difficult to understand, and some employers may be longing for the good ol’ days of hiring Gen-Xers.

Generation “Yers,” those young people whose ages range roughly from 17 to 24, are  ambitious, technologically savvy, impatient, demanding, disengaged, blunt and very skeptical, according to Eric Chester, who was a speaker at the Bearing Specialists Assn.’s recent convention in Marco Island, Florida. These new employees are more likely to question authority and demand answers, he says.

Chester should know. He is founder and president of Generation Why Inc., a training and consulting firm offering insight to companies and organizations who are looking to hire this new generation of employees. He is also the author of nine books for and about youth.

“They [Generation Yers] cannot be recruited, retained and motivated the way employees were before,” he said.  “They’re not better, not worse, but different.”

Chester points out that “Our parents may not have liked their jobs, but they were loyal.” Now, loyalty is gone, and 32 percent of Americans say they’ll be working in a new job next year, he notes.

Other studies bear out Chester’s comments. Loyalty seems to have gone out the window for many Generation Yers, who have seen their parents downsized, right-sized, laid off or terminated from jobs they held for many years while many of their former bosses got huge severance packages.

Yet many Generation Yers are contradictory in nature. Despite being described as self-absorbed, 68 percent of them are involved in community causes, charity work and political campaigns, Chester says.

Also, Generation Yers have not had the same relationship with their parents as previous generations. Chester says they only have three to five minutes of face-to-face, meaningful dialogue with their parents each day, while they spend five to seven hours in front of their computers, socializing with their friends.

He tells employers not to pander to them “but to understand who they are and where they’re coming from.” Some of these new employees have higher expectations than the previous generation, for example. They’re more questioning of their bosses and want to engage in productive work from Day 1.

During interviews with this year’s Big 50 distributors (June 2006) we had a variety of opinions from top executives about Generation Y. The president of one company says these employees aren’t motivated and “have this mentality that they deserve something and don’t have to work for it.”

On the other hand, another top executive told us he enjoys the challenges of working with this new generation, many of whom are eager to learn and want to be promoted. 

One thing’s for sure: As more than 60 million baby boomers head off to retirement, managers are going to have to cope with a host of problems and personalities with this new generation of employees.

Posted by Jack Keough on May 21, 2007 | Comments (2)