Who?

There is no consensus over the exact birth dates that define Gen Y, also known by some as echo boomers and millennials. But the broadest definition generally includes the more than 70 million Americans born 1977 to 2002.

What?

What?
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.' "

Y?
Why are they so important?:
High expectations of self: They aim to work faster and better than other workers.
High expectations of employers: They want fair and direct managers who are highly engaged in 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 on Day 1.
Goal-oriented: They want small goals with tight deadlines so they can build up ownership of tasks.

But most of all:
Under the narrow definition, as they take their first jobs, Gen Y would be the fastest-growing segment of the workforce — growing from 14% of the workforce to 21% over the past four years to nearly 32 million workers.

Extra note:
A major characteristic of Generation Y was the arrival of the Internet. Generation X mostly viewed the computer as a "geeky" thing to have in the 1980s and early 1990s (or minor class jealousy for those who could do their English homework on the computer instead of the typewriter), but Gen Y as been universally exposed to the computer as general users (rather than Gen X's technically-oriented users) and now a computer lies in almost every household of at least moderate financial means. Ironically, using paper-based resources such as libraries became seen as "geeky" by Gen Y.

Hey, I am a '77er
I am part of that generation!

Posted on January 30, 2006
in Linking context

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