Articles, reports, posts and studies on the millennial phenomenon.
During his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. In his first few weeks as President-Elect, he claimed to be instrumental in keeping a Carrier plant stateside.
But is it really practical to assume that manufacturing jobs are going to make a comeback? It doesn’t matter who’s president. The research indicates those jobs aren’t coming back.
The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.
I make my living from consulting, writing, and speaking about the multi-generation workforce. And even though they’ve now been in the workforce for 20 years, I’m still asked daily what I think about millennials.
What’s behind this obsession with the millennials? It’s simple. We haven't liked their attitude toward work, and we want to fix it.
Guess what? It’s time for managers (and parents) to get over it. It’s time for consultants and the media to stop playing into the millennial hype and leveraging it for personal gain. And here’s why:
A millennial wrote into Inc Magazine with the following problem:
I was able to get a summer internship at a company that does work in the industry I want to work in after I graduate. Even though the division I was hired to work in doesn't deal with clients or customers, there still was a very strict dress code. I felt the dress code was overly strict but I wasn't going to say anything, until I noticed one of the workers always wore flat shoes that were made from a fabric other than leather, or running shoes, even though both of these things were contrary to the dress code.
I spoke with my manager about being allowed some leeway under the dress code and was told this was not possible, despite the other person being allowed to do it. I soon found out that many of the other interns felt the same way, and the ones who asked their managers about it were told the same thing as me. We decided to write a proposal stating why we should be allowed someone leeway under the dress code. We accompanied the proposal with a petition, signed by all of the interns (except for one who declined to sign it) and gave it to our managers to consider. Our proposal requested that we also be allowed to wear running shoes and non leather flats, as well as sandals (not flip-flops though) and other non-dress shoes that would fit under a more business casual dress code. It was mostly about the footwear, but we also incorporated a request that we not have to wear suits and/or blazers in favor of a more casual, but still professional dress code.
Having grown up amid growing media fragmentation, Millennials are hyper adept at multitasking and are fully immersed in both their digital and physical lives. Notably, findings from more than a dozen Nielsen Global Survey reports from 2013-2016, which polled the attitudes of more than 30,000 online consumers in more than 60 countries, revealed that Millennials are a social, community-driven generation that values the voice of the individual.
