Gen Y change jobs like they change underwear…
There’s been a lot written on how Generation Y is transforming the workplace. They don’t want what their parents wanted, but it looks like they may not really know what they want. (By Gen Y I mean those of you born roughly between 1982 to 1994.)
A new Gen Y survey found that 70% of recent graduates leave their first jobs within two years. College career-services company Experience Inc. released the survey yesterday that also revealed:
* 43% of Gen Y are not in the career they expected to be in after college, either because they couldn’t find a job, or another opportunity presented itself.
* 60% are currently looking for another job or career, despite the fact that 57% indicated that they are also happy at their current job.
So what do these numbers tell us about this generation?
Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel has some thoughts:
1. They leave their options open, ready to snag the best opportunity possible, regardless of their current employer.
2. They are branded as “disloyal” and demand a lot from their employer to even stay a few years.
3. They are not taught how to secure a job that matches their passion in College, so they jump around from company to company in search of the perfect job.
4. They realize that there is no job security anymore and that no employer will take care of them forever, which is different than what gen-X’ers were told (who are putting in 10+ years at a single company).
I think it’s a great thing that they don’t want to play by the rules. But it also can suck for a young person if they just keep trying out jobs/careers without ever figuring out what they really want.
My intern Katherine, who’s in college, is trying to figure out what she wants. I recently gave her a copy of “What Color Is Your Parachute” to help her on her journey. I know, it’s an old book, but it really helped me. She’s going to review the book in this blog next week so you’ll all be able to find out if it’s worth anything to the Gen Yers.
The reason I bring the book up is it helped me when I got out of college. I didn’t know what direction to take with my career path. I knew I wanted to be a journalist but the rest was a bit murky.
There’s nothing wrong with testing the waters early on in your career. But sometimes I get the feeling people are trying so hard not to be part of the norm that they shoot themselves in the foot. Sort of like, you keep changing your underwear but your butt still stinks.
So do a bit of career homework. It’s a smart idea to take stock of your abilities and interests and figure out what job would best suit you. Look at it like you’re writing a paper and the topic is you. Research you and even talk to friends, family, and people you admire about you to figure out what you wants.
There’s a whole cottage industry that has been spawned around understanding Gen Y. Employers want to know how to hire, manage and deal with you wacky kids. There are endless Gen Y websites and experts blah blahing about what you need. I don’t remember just reading articles about and by people my age when I was in my early twenties. While I loved hanging with my contemporaries and slam dancing together at the local clubs, I looked at the whole world as my learning fields.
It’s time for you all to stop answering surveys and allowing yourselves to be put under microscopes like some sort of new strand of bacteria, and figure out what will make you happy.
There’s nothing wrong with switching jobs. I did it early on. And Schawbel says it can help expand your “knowledge, professional relationships and overall experience.”
But wouldn’t it be nice to bypass one or two jobs along the way that you probably would get little out of and just waste precious time? It’s possible, if you take time to paint even a partial picture of the career you want. It’s no guarantee you’ll end up on a straight path to career nirvana but it will go a long way in mitigating your inner suffering.
September 6th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Since I am a father of six, four of them Yildren as you say,let me be the first conservative Republican to tell you these Yildren are outstanding. This generation has and I beleive will be far better prepared and far better capable to live happy and productive lives than I’d say most generations those of us over 40 have known. The first thing they are doing correctly is they are bending the rules the right way. They tend to give notice when moving on to another job rather than just leave it abruptly. They have learned not to burn any bridges.
‘Loyalty’ in the work place is humorous as far as my life experience. It is because previous employers demanded it up until the time they decided to either close up or ‘downsize’. Of course if you are a lumberjack, what do you do when all the trees are gone? If you were a steel worker and they decided it is too bad for the environment to spew carbon dioxide and other particulates in the air, this was of course before my grandmother reached her 95th birthday, well then the loss of your livlihood was a matter of life or death. I mean, face it, Al Gore claims our earth will die off and while Pelosi visits Tibet to see the Dali Lama, and is enlightened with ’saving the planet’, our Yildren are not buying it.
They see the paranoid delusions most generations have become before and are willing to call us all ‘crackpots’ for more virtual reasons than we know. This is the first generation in the history of the world that has access to such tremendous information and in most cases video to prove it. Witht he state of the world as it is, and again video to prove it, we have enlightened this particular generation to become unlike all of us. One aspect I noticed, we taught them to fear strangers and be weary of familiarity. I love how I see these children be cautiously aware of everyone, except themselves.
My 18 year old daughter who is now a high school senior read Tom Brokaw’s wonderful book about the ‘greatest generation’. She also read the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ and ‘Mein Kumpf’. How she put the perspective of generations past being ignorant surprised me, but when she read ‘Helter Skelter and compared it to Brokaw’s book, I was astonished. It is like the Doo-wop generation and the 60’s flower children figured they knew it all when they all knew nothing.
She spoke with her great Uncle Eddy, who just passed away in ‘05. He was 86, and a survivor of Aushwitz. He was one of three brothers who went there, and the only one to survive. My daughter was my brother’s child, but he had a drug problem. He died in ‘01 of an OD, but I was her father since she was 3 days old. Her mother, who is estranged from her for all but a few months of her life was jewish and I allowed her the benfit of Judaism and Christianity as I am a christian. she says she chose God over all.In her conversations with her Uncle Eddy, who I had known long before she was born, she told me that no one has ever come close to describing how evil Hitler really was. She told me how totally unaware or ignorant the world was not to see it coming. And Brokaw’s book, which I read after she did, certainly put a differnet perspective on humanity than I thought it would.
These kids today are heading in the right direction whether you believe it or not. Would I be considered a true product of the ME-generation if I’d have stayed with Authur Treacher’s Fish and chips for the last 30 years? oops, they closed all their area stores in the 80’s…I’d been loyal and out of luck. Be lotal and be true to yourself. That is timeless and very serious ingenuity. and i believe these kids get it.