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.