Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

gen y at work

An interesting observation about Generation Y in the workplace from a Poynter article about how to manage Gen Y employees. I don’t know how fully I agree with the author’s generalizations about my generation, but then maybe I don’t really fit all that well into them. (I mean, depending on who’s defining it, I’m either at the tail end of Gen X or the very beginning of Gen Y.)

A lot of these insights came from the book “Managing Generation Y,” by Carolyn Martin and Bruce Tulgan. They write of Gen Y: “In essence, they want to be ‘paid volunteers’ -– to join organizations not because they have to, but because they really want to, because there’s something significant happening there.”

(“Boomer Bosses, Meet Your New Employees” - 08/25/05)

That is how I feel about working, actually. I want (and I think I have) a job that I can feel passionately about, where my responsibilities are largely things I’d be interesting in doing even if I wasn’t being paid to do them. I don’t want to feel like I’m spending 40 hours a week just slumming it in boredom or misery so I can collect a paycheck. I want to feel like I’m contributing to something worthwhile, and that my contribution is somehow making a difference. I don’t know if Martin and Tulgan’s generalization is true of my generation as a whole, but I can say that this particular one is true of me.