Understanding Y

CHAPTER 15 Y Work?

Ryan Gibson

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Confucius

You've heard about Generation Y's less-than-flattering reputation several times already throughout this book: that we're a self-entitled group who were placed on pedestals by our doting Baby Boomer parents and raised during prosperous economic times. We saw in chapter 2 how older colleagues tend to view Y as overly ambitious dreamers who don't want to pay their dues and are only concerned about higher pay and more time off.

A stark contrast to this picture is one of Gen Y as a driven generation — which is what our high rates of entrepreneurship, stellar education and super-connectedness suggest. We're a generation who, if we don't know how to do something, will find a way to learn it.

Millennials were born to be workplace powerhouses, and we're changing the way work happens. We arrive at the office with an active knowledge of business and strategic issues, with the goal of reforming and stimulating operations.

Millennials display a pursuit of knowledge and understanding that prior generations simply didn't show. We know this approach is transforming our workplaces and even technology by way of cloud computing and apps. Even the way we communicate via emails and Skype is informed by Gen Y values. Although ‘interconnectedness’ has become a throwaway term, it very much sums up the twenty-first century workplace mentality.

For example, I spent some time working ...