USA Today says: “They’re young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office and/or listen to iPods at their desks. They want to work, but they don’t want work to be their life.”
In case you haven’t been introduced, meet your new workforce, the “Millennials.” They include about 70 million Americans born between 1977 and 2002 (and usually, it’s a narrower gap of those ages 16-27). What’s so special about this new generation of employees is that they’ve enjoyed the luxuries of digital technology throughout their entire lives.
Cathy O’Neill, SVP at career management company Lee Hecht Harrison, adds that “the millennium generation has been brought up in the most child-centered generation ever. They’ve been programmed and nurtured. Their expectations are different.” For Millennials, our needs, wants, skills, interactions, sociability and expectations are all different from previous generations. We’re the first generation of digital multi-taskers, able to juggle e-mail, files/ documents, music and videos all with one hand (and a phone). We’re tech-savvy, high-performing and high-maintenance.
FreshMinds Talent, in partnership with Management Today, surveyed more than 1,000 people in a study entitled “Work 2.0.” It suggests that Millennials are generally more ambitious, more brand conscious and tend to move jobs more often than ever before. More than any previous generation, today's young professionals are plugged in 24/7 with a world of communication and information at their fingertips. Their great expectations come from million-dollar success stories that have transformed a lifetime of paper-pushing cubicle work into digital technology innovators.
Millennials live, eat and breathe digital and have already begun to push the limits of technology, an asset for any company forging into the future. If you don’t mind the occasional “cool” being tossed around in office work chatter, IM bubbles popping up over Excel spreadsheets or funky, dancing iPod speaker robots on desktops, we Millennials will definitely return a high yield.
Interesting Facts about Millennials:
They spend a lot of time at the gym
More than 1/3 of 18-25-year olds have at least one tattoo
30% have a piercing in places besides earlobes
*In their recent book, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa found that, of 7,705 U.S. college students:
97% own a computer
94% own a cell phone
76% use Instant Messaging
15% of IM users are logged on 24/7
34% use Web sites as their primary source of news
28% own a blog and 44% read blogs
49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
75% of college students have a Facebook account
60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
Other terms for Millennial:
Generation Now: has been used as well to reflect the urge for instant-gratification that technology has imparted
Computer Generation
Generation D (for "Digital")
Generation M (for Millennium or Multi-Task)
Net Gen, a shortened form of "Net Generation" (similar to the related term "Net Natives")
Posted by Samantha Sims
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