I love Gen Ys and am a huge ambassador. (Also, I am one, so no surprises there!). Gen Ys are those born between the early 1980s and early 1990s, while Gen Z are those born from the mid-1990s to those currently being born.
I believe that although Gen Ys sometimes have a bad reputation for wanting to fast-track life by not putting in the hard yards, our lack of patience is in fact a result of being highly ambitious. We’ve seen our parents get divorced, We’ve seen the Global Financial Crisis, we’ve seen people work for 20 years only to get made redundant, we were old enough to know exactly what was happening on September 11, 2001 and many of us saw our parent/s struggle to raise families on a single income in jobs they didn’t necessarily love.
Combined with the appearance of a vast array of highly accessible information via the internet that we wouldn’t normally have been able to get our hands on, and you have a generation of young, highly ambitious men and women unwilling to live through the same grind as our parents. Not when the world is right at our feet! Not when others are becoming insanely successful in previously unconsidered industries, like technology start-ups and online-only trades.
I was inspired to write this article following a piece I read today in The Australian Financial Review by Rachel Nickless, who quoted US author Tamara Erickson.
According to the article, “Older executives tend to think that Gen Y workers don’t want to “pay their dues”, Erickson says. “Frankly, [Gen Y] don’t want to do some grubby job for five years in the hope it pays off.” She argues it is not that the generation is lazy and entitled, but it is influenced by the September 11 terror attacks and the wars that followed, as well as other acts of violence like the Port Arthur massacre. All this taught the generation that random things can happen and it is best to live life to the fullest now.”
This struck a massive chord with me because I feel like that is what’s driven me in my career. I’m not interested in hoping something pays off, like Erickson says. I want my hard work to mean something now, not in 10 or 20 years time; I want to work towards something bigger than myself, something that rewards and challenges, as well as helping other people.
I believe that many Gen Ys are looking for meaning in love over money, although we want the freedom that only money can buy. This is why many Gen Ys are budding entrepreneurs and don’t accept that they will be working in a 9 to 5 job forever to pay the mortgage, as evidenced by the hundreds (thousands?) of start-up businesses led by Millennials, from technology start-ups to health and wellbeing businesses, coaches, designers, bloggers… The list is endless.
Of course, it’s a generalisation, but I believe Gen Ys are optimistically seeking more in life. Surely, this type of energy can only bring good to the world.
Are you Gen Y? What do you think of the stereotypes?