Understanding Generation-Y in 5 Easy Steps

There seems to be a glut of posts, articles and media attention focused around helping baby-boomers understand the crop of this wondrous and frustrating new generation.

It’s amazing to me how most households in the past two decades housed both boomers and millennials and yet neither generation can manage to understand the other. What exactly causes this gaping generational divide?

GL Hoffman over at What Would Dad Say? wrote a great post explaining why boomers are the way they are offering 8 historical events that have shaped the attitudes of those born between 1946 and 1964.

As a public service for all those confused boomers out there, I submit my list of the 5 events that shaped the lives of Generation-Y in hopes of giving everyone a better understand of why we act the way we do:

1. 9-11
When my mother was 18, she watched footage of the first man setting foot on the moon. A few months before I turned 18, I watched coverage of the twin towers collapsing as planes crashed into them. If there was ever a comparison between the America our parents grew up in and the one we live in now, this is it. Boomers watched this country triumph and make strides over foreign nations. Millennials watch as foreign countries take out their resentment of American intervention upon us. We may not be as ambitious as our boomer parents but maybe it’s because we’ve seen what being #1 gets you and we’re choosing a different path for ourselves.

2. The Demise of Social Security
With the first set of baby boomers retiring and collecting social security in 2007, many millennials see this as the beginning of the end to a guaranteed, care-free retirement. With 401K plans and IRAs replacing traditional pension plans, Generation-Y is feeling the pressure to make more money than ever before. Getting advanced degrees, going into debt, living at home to save money—this is the reality of many of today’s 20-somethings, as I’m sure we’re all aware. This causes a lot of instability and anxiety for someone just starting their career. It’s drilled into us from elementary school: work hard, get an education, get a good job and you’ll be ok. But a lot of us are finding out that this is not that easy and it’s beginning to scare us.

3. Rocketing Divorce Rates
Divorce rates in America have skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s during the formative years of Generation-Y. Good or bad, the changes in family units have had a definite impact on the attitudes and lifestyle choices of young people today. Many of us saw our parents work themselves to the bone at the detriment of their marriages and families. I think a large part of the reason many millennials want to rise up the corporate ladder so quickly is because they want to spend their single years working and amassing the kind of wealth that can support a family during their later years so they don’t have to work as hard and can pursue the happiness their parents never seemed to have.

4. The Internet
The impact the internet is obvious. Kids today don’t have to make a stop at the public library to conduct a research project. Phone books are more often used as booster seats than to look up the number to the local pizza joint. The great thing about Generation-Y is that they’ve grown up with this technology, they’ve embraced it and internalized it. Famous 20-somethings like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, are circumventing coffee-fetching, copy-making entry-level jobs and earning millions before they turn 25. Generation-Y has the unnatural ability to harness this new technology and use it to their benefit in ways that older generations just can’t seem to grasp. With role-models like this, can you blame us for being impatient with the banality of office politics?

5. Helicopter Parents
If boomers want to know how members of Generation-Y ended up the way they are, maybe it’s time to take a look inward. Blame Dr. Spock for telling you to buffet our self-esteem. Blame MTV for cutting our attention spans in half. But the reality is: boomers raised us. Coddled we may be, but ultimately I think the underlying issue is not the difference in attitudes of each generation but the difficulty of transitioning from a parent-to-child relationship to a peer-to-peer one. Most boomers are managing employees who are the same age as their children. Perhaps they are stuck with the perception of these young faces as children who should fall in line when directed. But unfortunately for boomers, millennials have most likely spent the past 4 years or so rebelling against their parents and are not willing to submit in the same way that they used to. Hence, there is tension in the workplace.

While trying to understand where the other is coming from is a worthwhile exercise, as I’ve stated in a previous post, I really do think we are experiencing nothing but normal growing pains. Kids will always be kids. And grown-ups will always be baffled at “the way kids behave today.”

Can’t we all just try to get along?

Patience is Not a Virtue for Gen-Y

I wrote a post last week about how Age is the New Glass Ceiling. In it I openly wondered why companies choose to hire older, more experienced candidates from outside the company into managerial or influential positions rather than promote younger, but successful employees from within.

I received some interesting feedback from readers:

“The one thing I’m finding is that companies tend to be careful of one hit wonders. In the sense that they expect a behavior to be demonstrated consistently (this may mean a year or 2) before you can be promoted. Far too many people (millennials especially) come out of school and because they do well on their first project think they should be promoted to Sr. VP!”

“What would have happened, I am wondering today, if someone had given me the advice I like to give young people who wonder why they are not doing better in their job:

Go to the Mirror, Look Yourself in the Eye, and say This Is All My Fault. Take responsibility.”

“Your post sounds like a bit of belly aching–if you really want to advance your career you NEED to pick up and go to another firm. Every time I have done that I get a 15-20% raise. Guess what–you’ll rarely get that by staying in the same place…”

What I find so interesting about these comments is that they automatically assume my performance at work is not good. Which only serves to prove the point I was trying to make in my post:

I should be judged on the quality of my work–not my age.

I feel I speak for lots of these so-called “demanding” millennials who have been in the workforce for a while, who read the self-help books and blogs like my own who are trying to do everything right, who take every boring project and work late every night, who want to play the game so they can get ahead—and yet are running into a wall when it comes to promotion or recognition for their efforts.

After spending some time reflecting on my post and the reactions it received, I came to a realization about why age is such a frustrating thing for most of Gen-Y:

Age is the one thing we can’t change no matter how hard we try.

I feel that there are lots of mid-level or managerial positions I qualify for based on my skill set, interests and previous experience, however, they usually require 2 – 3 more years of professional experience than I currently have. What exactly can I do about this? Nothing but wait. And I think that is at the root of the frustration for many young people.

Is it a millennial thing? Is it just the folly of youth? Most likely it’s a combination of both. And for a generation that was taught “if you can believe, you can achieve” being told to wait can be a hard lump to swallow.

5 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your Resume

I’ve been doing a ton of interviews lately to fill some open positions in my department and have become inspired to share/vent my observations about the perfect résumé. Here are some tips from a hiring manager about what you can do to vastly improve the quality of your résumé and improve your chances of getting a job:

1. Ditch the Objective
I don’t get why people put this on their résumés. Obviously your objective is to get a job at my company (and if it’s not, it should be!), so why waste valuable white space telling me something I already know? Your résumé is there to tell me what I don’t know: your unique skills, past experience, education, etc. So focus on selling yourself and forget about outlining your objectives.

 

2. Forget Fancy Formatting
Unless you’re applying for a graphic design or other artistic position, don’t worry about using sophisticated templates for your résumé. I spend about 2 minutes scanning each résumé and don’t really pay much attention to how pretty it looks. Not to mention the fact that people have different versions of word processing software and sometimes fancy formatting doesn’t always appear the way it was intended. As a hiring manager, I’m a lot more interested in whether you have the right skill set and experience for the position than if you can use all the template features in Microsoft word.

 

3. Bullet Points Are Your Friend
I’ve seen many different résumé formats and have decided that my favorite is the bulleted list. Follow each job title by a list of 3 - 5 bullet points about specific duties or accomplishments you had at that position. I have a “master résumé” with 10 – 12 bullet points under each job title, 5 of which I then cut and paste into a new document customized to match the criteria of each specific position I’m applying for.

 

4. Always Include Dates
Recruiters pay attention to gaps in work history. Not including dates of employment makes it seem like you have something to hide and most likely it will come up in an interview anyway. It’s better to just be up front about gaps in employment. Put accurate dates on your résumé and address any issues in your cover letter.

 

5. Proofread, Proofread, Proofread
I recently had to listen to a fellow interviewer complain for a full 30 minutes about typos in a potential candidate’s résumé so I thought I’d reiterate the importance of proofing your résumé as well as cover letter. Working in an editorial department, I admit bias on this point but typos and misspellings can show a lack of attention to detail, casts doubt on your intelligence level and can cause some hiring managers to infer a lack of respect and interest in their company (the thought being that if you really wanted the job, you’d take the time to proof your work instead of rushing through a stack of 50 résumés that need to be sent to 50 different companies).

The purpose of a résumé is to sell yourself to a potential company. If you just stick to the facts and forego the fancy stuff you’ll save yourself as well as the people who are reading it both time and effort. I think both parties can appreciate that.