The Generation Gap - Are you a Y?

They're young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office or listen to iPods at their desk.They want to work, but they don't want work to be their life. If you're guilty as charged, you are a Generation Y

Who are the Gen Y?
Gen Y would be one of the fastest growing segment of workforce that are under 30 years of age. Highly motivated, goal oriented and ever ready to learn and to grow professionally.

Gen Yers have high expectations:

• High expectations of self: They are goal oriented and highly motivated. they expect themselves to be faster and more efficient than the others.

• High expectations of employers: They want bosses who are fair and directly involved with their professional development

• Ongoing learning: They seek out creative challenges and view colleagues as vast resources from whom to gain knowledge.

• Immediate responsibility: They want to make an important impact right on Day 1.

• Goal-oriented: They want small goals with tight deadlines so they can build up ownership of tasks.

(Source: Bruce Tulgan of RainmakerThinking)


This Gen Yers are infiltrating companies with an aging workforce. This age group is moving into the labor force during a time of major demographic change, where fresh-faced college graduates are working alongside old timers. Young college graduates are overseeing employees old enough to be their parents. And new job entrants are changing careers faster than college students change their majors, creating frustration for employers struggling to retain and recruit talented high-performers.

Unlike the generations that have gone before them, Gen Y has been pampered, nurtured and programmed with a slew of activities since they were toddlers, meaning they are both high-performance and high-maintenance, Tulgan says. They also believe in their own worth.

"Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today's workforce," says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York. "They've grown up questioning their parents, and now they're questioning their employers. They don't know how to shut up, which is great, but that's aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, 'Do it and do it now.' "

So do you think you're a Gen Yer?