Is the millennial generation a bunch of job-hoppers seeking instant gratification? Not at all, new research says.
by REBECCA DUBE
Extracts from From Toronto Globe and Mail
April 14, 2008 at 8:52 AM EDT
Oh, those fickle Generation Y workers: Raised by helicopter parents, now these coddled young adults are entering the work force and screwing up everything with their all-about-me attitudes and their impatience with quaint traditions such as working hard for promotions.
Right?
Wrong, 25-year-old Ursula Terlecki says.
“You do have to pay your dues … I always feel like I have something to prove” says Ms. Terlecki, a publicity co-ordinator for CanWest Broadcasting. She aspires to be a full-fledged publicist one day, but says, “if I don’t get promoted in the next year, it’s not like I’m going to leave.”
Gasp - a Gen Yer with a work ethic. And she’s not alone. Plenty of workers in their early 20s beg to differ with self-proclaimed experts who have identified the “millennial” generation as one filled with self-interested job-hoppers.
Now, Ms. Terlecki and her friends have hard data to back them up. A seminar debunking the conventional wisdom about millennials, the generation born roughly between 1980 and 2000, was one of the bigger draws at last week’s conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Francisco.
The message: Don’t believe the millennial hype.
“It’s this snowball that keeps going,” says Evan Sinar, an organizational psychologist who led the session on millennial myths. Examining research from four new studies of thousands of job applicants and employees, he said, “we found the differences [between generations] weren’t there, or were smaller than expected.”
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that young people aren’t as engaged in their work as their Generation X and baby boomer colleagues, Dr. Sinar says. On the contrary, millennial workers are just as enthused by and invested in their jobs as any other generation.
Which is true?
Myth
Millennials are not really engaged at work, and will probably job-hop a lot.
They demand instant feedback, even when applying for a job.
Their tech-savvy will crush older generations.
Reality
Millennials score the same on measures of career engagement as Gen-Xers and baby boomers.
They’re willing to go through a long job application process.
They prefer online tools, but don’t necessarily have more experience than Xers and boomers.
