Unemployment is terrible, but you know what can be worse (at least for young people)? Having a job that isn’t ” fun and flexible “:
Generation Y, or millennials, make up roughly 50 million 18- to 30-year-olds. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study on social trends, this generation is on course to become the most educated in history and, in a decade or so, will account for nearly half the employees in the world.
Dr. John Butler, a University of Texas professor, has conducted extensive research on innovation and millennials. He says one defining characteristic of millennials is their short attention spans.
“I think that Gen-Y does not expect necessarily to be tied to a job,” Butler said.
That’s a gutsy decision for a generation with 13 percent unemployment.
“The big one I hear about, and I’m guilty too, is a sense of entitlement,” said Gen-Y consultant Jason Dorsey, who rakes in up to $25,000 per speech teaching Fortune 500 companies how to work with his generation. “It’s showing up and just feeling like people owe you things,” the 33-year-old says.
Dorsey adds that some millennials also have a hard time dealing with negative feedback. He says it stems from the way many were raised.
“The reality is, we’ve had parents who have told us how great we are since we were kids, you know. We listen to Baby Einstein to get smarter. We go to school and suffer from grade inflation, and if we didn’t get an A, we went and negotiated. We’ve built up our self-esteem, and the result is, we can’t deal with adversity,” Dorsey said.
Although my generation (Gen-X) caused this problem, the sense of entitlement drives me nuts. But rather than go off on a cranky old man rant, I’ll refer you to this post last month by a young Boston grad student: Dear universe, please stop writing articles about Gen Y’s First World Problems
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
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