The aforementioned post by Ryan Healy sparked off a whole bunch of comments, as posts on Brazen Careerist tend to do. One, in particular, by a poster calling himself ‘jrandom42′ sparked some thinking.

The comment:

Bluntly put, nobody gets a free pass on anything, until they can prove to me that they can deliver results that positively affect my goals and bottom line.

In other words, show me you why deserve these exceptions from what everyone else has to adhere to, and then we’ll talk. And it’s still not guaranteed you’re going to get any of them.

I think this is a dangerous attitude that’s been cropping up a lot as this Generation Y hysteria works its way through businesses. It’s almost as if there are three stages of reaction to Generation Y in the workplace.

It tends to go:

1. Shock & Outrage – “When I was your age, I was damn lucky to get the job I had! I worked sixty hours a week breaking chunks of coal with nothing but my forehead. And at the end of the week, when my boss came by, I said THANK YOU.”
2. Dismissal – “Ha ha, whatever you say, kid. You just wait until you get a little older and see what’s out there in the REAL WORLD. Then you’ll be singing a different tune!”
3. Begrudging Acceptance – “Okay, sure, whatever. If you want to be a lazy jerk unlike EVERYONE ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF WORK than I GUESS you can have some slack. Provided you prove yourself to be a model employee under our current structure first. I’ll do you a FAVOUR.”

I think getting to stage three is enough for a lot of Gen Ys. Even though it comes with some passive aggression, at least your boss or manager is giving you the freedom you need. And, sure, it kind of sucked to have to slog through energy- and morale-sapping months to “prove yourself” but, if you’re creative and talented, you got through it. And then you were able to develop a situation that gave you at least some of the work-life balance and structure you were looking for in the first place.

But this isn’t how it should be.

Generation Y is not asking for special treatment. We’re not asking that you give us freedoms that other employees don’t have. Absolutely, things need to be broken down based on the type of responsibility of each job — if you’ve been hired to answer phones or paint cars, you probably can’t work from home — but that doesn’t mean things can’t be flexible, equitable and universal. Everyone who works for you should be afforded the same arrangement, within reason.

Quite frankly, this is the only way it can work. If you start letting your 23-year-old employee go home early because that’s the way he works best, your 10-year-veteran sales person who likes to stay a half hour after work hours just to show the bosses how dedicated he is (this is absolutely GROSS behaviour, by the way) is probably going to get upset.

Which tends to be where it gets complicated.

Look, I’d never argue that management is simple. With multiple generations in the workplace, it’s only going to get more complicated. But going the easy route, where you set blanket policies and only give flexibility when your younger employees demand it, is not a viable solution. To truly make the intergenerational office work, Generation Y needs to accelerate change for EVERYONE in the office, not just themselves.

Photo ‘Office Hours’ by shawnblog. Licensed under Creative Commons

Despite all anecdotal evidence, a lot of Gen Yers still tend to worry a lot about their potential in the job market. It’s probably due to the experiences their parents and older siblings may have had entering the workforce decades ago, struggling to find anything but the dreaded McJob. It’s so bad that this trepidation sometimes causes people to turtle themselves in academic institutions, piling on degrees and diplomas in the hopes of guaranteeing career potential right out of the gate.

The truth of the matter is that all that education, while undoubtedly important for other reasons, isn’t entirely necessary. Because, in the end, Generation Y’s secret weapon for career success is simply demographics.

Since the first wave of baby boomers reached the age of 60 in 2006 and have entered retirement, an increasing number of professionals are leaving the job market each year. So it’s not surprising that more than 80% of employers say they are concerned about a looming shortage of qualified workers.

There’s little reason today for Gen Y to fear the job hunt (though obviously this can’t hold true for all sectors — some are in steep decline) because there are simply more job openings coming down the pipeline than there are workers.

That said, the word ‘qualified’ in the above quote is extremely important. More on that in a later post.

I don’t take notes during meetings at work. I’ve taken some flack for this in the past, as usually I am the ONLY person in the room not taking notes. I also never really took notes during school classes. Not even in university. I’ll jot down REALLY important items (phone numbers, deadline dates, really critical items) but, by and large, when you look over at me during a meeting, I’m not going to be writing anything down.

I’ve always thought of myself as a mental note taker.

But this post over at Penelope Trunk’s blog has got me questioning this practice. According to Penelope, mental note taking is bad practice.

I tell Ryan Paugh that mental notes is a joke. No one takes a mental note taker seriously. It looks like they don’t care. “Even if you’re a genius,” I tell him, “you have to take notes to show you are engaged.”

It used to be that note taking was for secretaries. When hotshots didn’t type, hotshots didn’t take notes. But now we know that people actually learn more when they write as they listen, and people learn more when they translate what they are hearing into their own idea nuggets, so it makes sense that writing notes is a hot-shot job now. Everyone takes notes.

As much as I hate to admit it, this does make sense. My rationale for not taking notes has always been that, even when I do take notes, I never end up looking at them again anyway. I have no organizational system for my notes. I have no organizational systems in general.

I just assume I’ll be able to remember it all. And, up until now, that hasn’t really been a problem. But I guess the question I need to ask myself is this: will that ALWAYS be the case?

I tend to tout the virtues of Gen Y a lot, but I think, in this case, I’ve come across something that truly is a flaw. While it IS possible to be TOO organized — and I’d definitely argue that a lot of ‘traditional’ paper-based organizational systems are a waste of time (and space!) — Gen Y’s hubris when it comes to things like “mental note taking” is a real flaw.

Kristin Gissaro at Generational Recruiting has a post on the many names of ‘Generation Y’. I had a similar struggle when trying to come up with a name for this blog — our generation really doesn’t have a ‘definitive name’, so how do you even begin to write about it?

In addition to their diverse ethnicities, which I think has a lot to do with why this generation is so different than those before, Gen Y has their own set of rules. They’re not wrong. They are just different. They have their own set of standards. Again, not wrong just different. More importantly, within the generation it changes from person to person.

So, who is this new generation?

Should we wait until this group of people has had enough time to shape the world and then classify and profile them?

Of all the various names you give us, I actually like “Generation M” the best, because it at least has the connotation of something that really defines us as a group — being mobile. That said, I’m reasonably sure that “Gen Y” is the name that’s going to stick. Yes, it’s derivative and not-at-all creative, but it is simple and instantly recognizable, and that goes a long way.

Plus, coincidence or not, we do tend to ask “Why?” a lot. So it works on that level too.

The above (taken from the absolutely awesome web comic xkcd — visit or you’re a fool) pretty well sums up my feelings toward wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It’s both an amazing resource and a fabulous time waster, and has become my quick go-to source for quick information about any subject, from actors and actresses to vacation destinations.

Yes, there’s the very real possibility of information being incorrect or (much more commonly) badly written, but the mountains of information more than make up for it.

Education has struggled with wikipedia since it hit the scene. Almost immediately after hearing wikipedia described to them, educators decided it was a menace — the academic equivalent of speculative hearsay. The rules fell into place very quickly: never cite wikipedia in a formal essay. You might as well source the National Enquirer.

Hearing their teachers continuously hammer home the message that wikpedia is unreliable has apparently had an effect on students, as evidenced by this report from a Generation Y workshop.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.

(emphasis mine)

And, sure, wikipedia probably shouldn’t become an automatically accepted authoritative source for academic essays. But you know what? Neither should anything else. The underlying message to all this “wikipedia is so unreliable!” chest-besting (which isn’t even really true) is that sources should be judged based on the medium in which they appear, and not on the quality of the source itself. For the most part, kids aren’t being told to look at their sources carefully before they quote them in an academic paper — they’re being told that the internet is bad, and print is good.

There is a way to make wikipedia a part of education, and it starts with teaching students the difference between a well-researched article on wikipedia versus a poorly-researched one. It could include instruction on examining footnotes, looking at the history and discussion pages and the way the article is presented. In short, teaching kids how to research instead of just blindly hunting for sources that their teacher has deemed as ‘acceptable’.

Wikipedia does have a place in academia. To argue otherwise is to ignore the massive growth and mindshare the site as claimed over the last few years. And there’s a way to make wikipedia fit with good, qualified research — it just requires a different approach to teaching.