An interesting Blog entry (and comments) in The Age today.
Business and the Gen Y Disconnect which links to this PDF report, Working Progress - How to Connect Reconnect Young People and Organisations.
It's all about Generation Y starting work for organisations from school and University/College.
The culture shock of starting work.
But wasn't it ever so? This is the third generation of Knowledge Workers, the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers faced the same shock of picking up the phone at work on our first day.
Maybe role-playing picking up the phone, at school, will help!!
I think there's one critical difference between Gen Y starting work today, compared with Gen X/Baby Boomers.......The Technology at home for a Gen Yer, is more advanced than at work.
Previously it was work that had all the technology, but it's work that now stops you using and communicating the way you do outside of work. Mobiles, Text, Chat, Weblogs, Vblogs, Podcasts, MySpace, Email, Skype, Video. Corporates want you to stop using this stuff when you come to work.
Especially those that think they have a security and governance issue.
Oh, and Corporates fear loss of productivity because you'll be yakking on the chat.
They think that implementing an intranet with some crappy search engine will give you all the information you need, not realising it's quicker to get on the chat "Hey Joan, where did you put that document?"
I don't know what the outcome will be. You join some big bank and find that their software is 2 generations behind, and that everything is in lock down so you can't use it the way you do at home. So if you're a GenYer why would you join some big institute that doesn't work the way you do?
It's a game of bluff. Will you compromise yourself, or will the bank change, in order to employ you?
Will there be a job shortage or a labour shortage?
Let's not forget that these employees are also potential customers, so it doesn't take long for the market to realise that these big corporates just don't (or can't) get it, so will everything move to Skype, PayPal, and Google?
Comments