Meet Your Future Employee

I was featured in Computerworld on October 23, 2007 about emerging Gen Y employees. I just wanted elaborate on a couple points after viewing some of the comments below the article.

One comment by an anonymous individual made the statement, “Generation Y largely consists of self centered, arrogant, and lazy individuals. They have an overblown sense of self worth and huge egos. Breaking them in isn’t worth the hassle. Avoid at all costs.” I have to disagree with you sir/madam. I work extremely hard, and continually reach out to help others. Ever since the legal working age I’ve held a job, and I continually seek new work to feed my appetite on learning new things. Growing up within a faith filled family taught me to care for others beside myself, in fact I would have to say that most Gen Y-ers beside myself make volunteering a commitment. Whoever made this statement was way out of line, and just stereotyped my whole generation without any relevant evidence.

When Beth Stackpole addressed me in the second paragraph, “She doesn’t write code, she isn’t gadget-crazed or Internet-obsessed, and she positively isn’t interested in a career as a programmer or tech support jockey,” it was a little far from the truth. I developed my website and this blog by coding myself, what I think she intended to say is that I don’t want to make coding and being the computer techy my life. What I do want, is a problem solving role that allows me to be the bridge between the developers and the end-user/client. Don’t get me wrong, knowledge of coding is vital to understanding how the world of computing works, I did not intend to downplay how vital the skill is to have, I just meant that I don’t want to make that my career focus.

Another area I would like to explore is this supposed “lack of business communication skills” as mentioned in the 6th paragraph of the article. I have to agree in part with Stackpole when she made this statement, there are a lot of fellow students of mine that don’t have the business acumen to be able to effectively present a pitch in front of an audience, but these are the small majority of students that have never held a job in their life and neglected to get an internship while enrolled in my college. Personally, putting two summer internships in at GE Healthcare have made me an effective public speaker because this company stresses having this skill. I don’t think this is just a problem with Gen Y, because when I look at my parent’s generation (late Gen X-ers), they are scared to pieces to address others in front of a group, just my own personal experience.

Moving on, I agree with Stackpole’s statement on work/life balance. For many with families, it’s critical to have that balance. When speaking with my fellow Gen Y-ers that are already employed in the workforce, more and more employers are becoming more family friendly. One such employer gives them the ability to work from home maybe 1 or 2 days out of the week if they don’t have client meetings, etc. For some jobs, like my own father’s business, I understand it may be totally unrealistic to give employees the ability to set their own hours and work from home. I know firsthand how much time and energy my father puts into running a small manufacturing company, and I am amazed how well my dad can keep everything in pretty good balance. Its important though for employers to always keep in mind that all of their employees have a family back at home to attend to.

Overall, I think the article was a great way to spur some discussion on the differences between generations.

Splash Pages…Comparable to a Detour Sign On the Road

For those of you considering building an online portfolio, or a website to showcase you, I have one major piece of advice…kill the splash page. I treat these splash pages like a detour sign in that I don’t even want to waste a click on getting into the website, and I take the detour to find another website that doesn’t subject me to wasting one click to get in.

It is statistically proven that people use three clicks with a website, and if they don’t find what they are looking for in 3 clicks, they move on. Why would you want one of those precious three clicks to be used up on a page that offers no real value to the site?

To back up my point, a web developer Jennifer Kyrnin on About.com, offers the downfalls of using splash pages.

The usability of a splash page is completely flawed. Your readers come to your site to enter it and a splash page prevents that.

Many readers don’t like splash pages – and in some studies 25% of visitors left a site right after seeing a splash page.

Splash pages break search engines. Since many splash pages only include a flash animation there isn’t a lot for a search engine to optimize on. And if you add content to the page in comments you can be penalized for spamdexing.

The animation can be repetitive. Readers who have seen the flash don’t often want to sit through it again, but if you forget to include a “skip” option they will have to.

While the flash movie or fancy animation may look really nice, the impression they make may be one of pretentiousness rather than detailing your skills.

If you submit your splash page to a search engine, the JavaScript codes that move customers to the next page may prevent the search engine from adding any page on the site.

Forty Years of Lessons Learned- A Retail Journey

Today, founder and chairman of the board of Best Buy Dick Schulze came and spoke at the Business Leaders Forum Luncheon at Marquette University. Schulze presented 10 valuable lessons when developing and running your own business.

1. Listen to your customers
– Hassle free shopping
– Quick & easy checkout
– Service after the sale
2. Know your competitors
– Differentiate yourself
-slashed prices, and are known as the low price leader
3. Persistence pays
– Stand by convictions
– Find a unique way to serve a niche
4. Find a mentor
– They ground you, give you directions
– Find someone actively engaged in business within the field of your choice
5. Hire strong people
– Bring in consultants if you aren’t good at something (ex. IT and HR at Best Buy)
– Make a case for company
– Promote from within. “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
6. Don’t Punish Mistakes
– Reward innovation
– Minimize mistakes, and don’t spread them through every area of business
– Hypothesize, test and verify
7. Leverage your strengths
– Strength at Best Buy= innovation
– Allow floor employees to have open line of communication to company’s decision makers
– Allow employees to be intrapreneurs (innovate from within)
8. Learn to listen
– 360 evaluation
– Solicit opinions from diverse groups
– Embrace diversity of thought
– Remove anything that blocks creativity and innovation
9. Create partnerships
– Offer end to end solution (ex. buy a satellite and have installation staff)
– Geek squad
10. Infrastructure is critical

Overlying message, “empower your employees, and delegate!”