Bridging the IT Generation Gap - ' Fast Risers' (
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Waiting for a promotion or choice assignment feels
like purgatory to many millennials. "They are looking
for a career path with shorter steps," Cornelio says.
"That becomes a big management issue: You have to
be more open to the idea that people will not stay in
the job for five years just because that's what people
used to do, but you also have to manage expectations
and not set them up to fail."
The trick is to understand the expectations of talented
younger workers while getting them proper
experience and not alienate older workers who came
up the traditional way in the process. Lincoln has tailored
its development program to accommodate the
interests of the people it hires out of college, paying
more attention than it once did to their preferences as
they rotate through a variety of job functions to see
different parts of the company and allow the company
to evaluate them in various roles. So far, says Cornelio,
there has been little pushback from people who were
assigned to jobs in a more traditional, top-down way,
but that may change over time. "It's a developing phenomenon,
the realization is just coming to people that
there is a difference."
Mike Orren, 35, felt tension between his fellow
Gen Xers and younger workers at the online publishing
company he founded, Pegasus News. "The
Xers were not as demanding or expectant of raises or
options, and the millennials were like, 'I've been here
15 minutes, can I put vice president on my card?' It's
not that we were being so elitist or hierarchical about
it, but it just seemed so different from what we were
used to." Things got really weird when some 20-something
workers wanted to bring their parents into the
mix. One guy showed up for a performance review
with his mom and dad in tow, and another wanted his
father to sit in on his stock-option negotiations. Orren
wasn't having it. "That just annoyed the crap out of
me," he says. "It's not appropriate."
Schneider stresses that his emphasis goes beyond
newer technologies like video and online training to
the goals of the training itself. "We know we have to
change the way we handle knowledge transfer and
training," he says. "You used to train people for 10 or
20 years on the job; now it's more about recruiting and
retaining them. You have to prepare for knowledge
transfer. We know we have to use documentation in
different media, not just the written word."
Many companies are moving away from traditional,
seniority-based career paths and focusing on
performance and potential, Erickson says. That benefits
workers of all ages—at least the good ones—and
creates an unprecedented mix of age groups working
together. That means managers must recognize generational
differences to head off potential conflicts and
leverage the benefits. Younger workers, she says, like
jobs that they don't already know how to do. "They
love to be thrown into situations where they don't
know how to do something, then network with others
to learn how to do it."
The word "entrepreneurial" comes up a lot in conversations
about Generation Y. "They have entrepreneurial
aspirations, they want to get away from structure,"
Erickson says. "Businesses tend to push people
into specialties, out on a limb, but I recommend that
corporations create lateral opportunities that give
people multiple options and keep them comfortable,
keep them challenged and interested."
And keeping them interested is an art. A senior
manager told her that one of his Gen X managers couldn't figure out what to do with a Gen Y worker who finished an 18-month assignment in four months. The answer: Give him another job to do. It sounds obvious, but a lot of companies are not taking the hint.
Younger employees may believe they can get a week's
worth of work done in 25 hours instead of 40, but find
it is socially awkward—and unrewarding—to do so.
The result, says Erickson: "A lot of Ys tell me they are
bored out of their minds."
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