Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 11:09 pm Posts: 24847 Location: this stark raving, sick, sad little world Gender: Male
Are young workers spoiled or trying to reshape working life?
Evan Wayne thought he was prepared for anything during a recent interview for a job in radio sales.
Then the interviewer hit the 24-year-old Chicagoan with this: “So, we call you guys the ‘Entitlement Generation,’ ” the baby boomer executive said, expressing an oft-heard view of today’s young work force. “You think you’re entitled to everything.”
Such labeling is, perhaps, a rite of passage for every crop of twentysomethings. In their day, baby boomers were rabble-rousing hippies, while Gen Xers were apathetic slackers.
Now, deserved or not, this latest generation is being pegged, too — as one with shockingly high expectations for salary, job flexibility and duties but little willingness to take on grunt work or remain loyal to a company.
“We’re seeing an epidemic of people who are having a hard time making the transition to work — kids who had too much success early in life and who’ve become accustomed to instant gratification,” said Dr. Mel Levine, a pediatrics professor at the University of North Carolina Medical School and author of a book on the topic called “Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.”
While Levine also notes today’s twentysomethings are long on idealism and altruism, “many of the individuals we see are heavily committed to something we call ‘fun.’ ”
He partly faults coddling parents and colleges for doing little to prepare students for the realities of adulthood and setting the course for what many disillusioned twentysomethings are increasingly calling their “quarter-life crisis.”
Meanwhile, employers from corporate executives to restaurateurs and retailers are frustrated.
“It seems they want and expect everything that the 20- or 30-year veteran has the first week they’re there,” said Mike Amos, a Salt Lake City-based franchise consultant for Perkins Restaurants.
Just about any twentysomething will tell you they know someone like this, and may even have some of those high expectations themselves.
Wayne had this response for his interviewer at the radio station: “Maybe we WERE spoiled by your generation. But I think the word ‘entitled’ isn’t necessarily the word,” he said. “Do we think we’re deserving if we’re going to go out there and (work hard) for you? Yes.”
He ended up getting the job — and, as he starts this month, is vowing to work hard.
Some experts who study young people think having some expectations, and setting limits with bosses, isn’t necessarily negative.
“It’s true they’re not eager to bury themselves in a cubicle and take orders from bosses for the next 40 years, and why should they?” said Jeffrey Arnett, a University of Maryland psychologist who’s written a book on “emerging adulthood,” the period between age 18 and 25. “They have a healthy skepticism of the commitment their employers have to them and the commitment they owe to their employers.”
Many young people also want to avoid becoming just another cog who works for a faceless giant.
Anthony DeBetta, a 23-year-old New Yorker, works with other twentysomethings at a small marketing firm — and said the company’s size makes him feel like he can make a difference.
“We have a vested interest in the growth of this firm,” he said.
Elsewhere, Liz Ryan speculates a more relaxed work environment at the company she runs — no set hours and “a lot of latitude in how our work gets done” — helps inspire her younger employees.
“Maybe twentysomethings have figured out something that boomers like me took two decades to piece together: namely, that there’s more to life than by-the-book traditional career success,” said Ryan, the 45-year-old CEO of a Colorado-based company called WorldWIT, an online and offline networking organization for professional women.
As much as some employers would like to resist the trend, a growing number are searching for ways to retain twentysomething employees — and to figure out what makes them tick.
“The manager who says, ‘I don’t have time for that,’ is going to be stuck on the endless turnover treadmill,” said Eric Chester, a Colorado-based consultant who works with corporations to understand what he calls “kidployees,” ages 16 to 24.
At Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, for instance, administrators have developed an internship with mentoring and more training for young nurses that has curbed turnover by more than 50 percent and increased job satisfaction.
Amos said small changes also have helped — loosening standards on piercings or allowing cooks to play music in the kitchen.
And Muvico, a company with movie theaters in a few Southern states, gives sporting goods and music gift certificates to young staffers who go beyond minimum duties.
“If you just expect them to stand behind a register and smile, they’re not going to do that unless you tell them why that’s important and then recognize them for it,” said John Spano, Muvico’s human resources director.
Still others are focusing on getting twentysomethings more prepared.
Neil Heyse, an instructor at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University, has started a company called MyGuidewire to provide career coaching for young people.
“It’s a hot issue and I think it’s getting hotter all the time,” Heyse said of work readiness. “There’s a great amount of anxiety beneath the surface.”
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
When I managed a hotline, my frontline workers constantly whined about the work they signed on to do and the environment they worked in (which was a palace compared to where I work now). It didn't seem to matter what age or gender they were. Of course, maybe the older workers talked to the younger workers and ended up getting sucked into groupthink.
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:46 pm Posts: 9617 Location: Medford, Oregon Gender: Male
Everybody's overworked and underpaid. Younger people are just starting to catch on, and seeing how executives get huge salaries and bonuses. Good for them. If everyone demands a little bigger slice of the pie maybe things will change to benefit workers a little more.
_________________ Deep below the dunes I roved Past the rows, past the rows Beside the acacias freshly in bloom I sent men to their doom
I have seen this same phenomenon where I work and I thinks it's just the nature of young workers, though being under 30 myself I am not to far away from them. I was pissed by first job coming out of school was tier 1 tech support. I quickly learned many people would kill for those jobs.
I wouldn't say they are more or less "entitlement" driven than anyone else, maybe just more vocal about it. Maybe their expectations are higher but they come from a generation where wealth was magically created by speculation on internet stocks and housing prices.
Plus, after a decade of "you did well if you feel good" education what do people really expect?
I hear a lot about that generational assumption, but I don't see much of it. I know I work my ass off...ten hour days during the school year, and I've been using my summer to lesson plan and develop new activities as well as landscape my yard and repair and paint the house. I have no problem with it, primarily because I enjoy seeing how my work pays off. Plus the work itself is a usually challenging either physically, mentally, or both. It's a fucking blast.
And it is eerily like all the hyper-negative articles and books written about generation x...read Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, it is all about how Gen X is the greatest disappointment in American history. Yee hah.
I wonder when these older generations who are so keen to criticize the coming of age generation will realize that since they raised this coming of age generation, that they should bear some responsibility for how this generation turned out?
Early Baby Boomers divorced in droves and helped to create the apathy and angst of Gen X. Late Baby Boomers spoiled their kids (some call them "The Millenials"--Neil Howe, Bill Strauss, Generations: The History of America's Future) to death and are now complaining that they act too "entitled" at work.
What the fuck did they expect? Give your kids everything they ask for, they will expect the world to give them everything they ask for...including lucrative jobs straight out of college w/o any ladder climbing or grunt work.
Give the kids a break. They will figure it all out just like all the other generations did.
_________________ cirlces they grow and they swallow people whole half their lives they say goodnight to wives they'll never know got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul and so it goes
...Late Baby Boomers spoiled their kids (.. to death and are now complaining that they act too "entitled" at work.
I think alot of goes back to expectations about co-workers. I have found a lot people fresh out of college seem to think engineers over 25 are out of touch. I like to sit them in front of a non Windows-based computer and let them start working.
Everyone comes out of college thinking they know everything they will need to for the rest of their lives. The sad thing is that with the pending Baby Boomer retirement, many of these kids will shoot up the ladder w/o earning it.
...Late Baby Boomers spoiled their kids (.. to death and are now complaining that they act too "entitled" at work.
I think alot of goes back to expectations about co-workers. I have found a lot people fresh out of college seem to think engineers over 25 are out of touch. I like to sit them in front of a non Windows-based computer and let them start working.
Everyone comes out of college thinking they know everything they will need to for the rest of their lives. The sad thing is that with the pending Baby Boomer retirement, many of these kids will shoot up the ladder w/o earning it.
Not if the gen x'ers get up that ladder first
But if I know anything about gen x, and I think I do, we'll be taking the "kids" who deserve it with us up that ladder.
_________________ cirlces they grow and they swallow people whole half their lives they say goodnight to wives they'll never know got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul and so it goes
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
broken_iris wrote:
The sad thing is that as Baby Boomers are laid off & forced into early retirement b/c their salaries are so high, many of these kids will shoot up the ladder w/o earning it.
*fixed
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
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