It should come as no surprise. For the last two years employers have been worrying about how to recruit, manage and retain their Generation Y employees, while a few doors down the office their colleagues in marketing have been equally tearing their hair out to engage them in brands that have long since lost their shine. So news from a well-known research agency that Generation Y are now setting the technology agenda - thus finally reaching what is traditionally the most remote and self-sufficient industry in terms of product development - is far from earth shattering.
But it is important. There is a strong argument to suggest that Gen Y aren’t the convention destroying rebels in the workforce and in the marketplace that they have been painted to be - our own Work 2.0 research comes to exactly those conclusions. But time and time again recruiters, marketeers and now product developers in even the most technology driven industries have been forced to recognised that they are subtly different - in many cases more demanding, more aware of the options open to them and more adventurous.
The research reveals that while Generation X are more technologically aware than ever before (one in five regularly reads blogs, up 33% from last year), they use technology to fulfill a need. Generation Y, on the other hand, take technology itself for granted. They don’t ask they question first then look for the answer online, they get to their computers and think “what can this do for me?” The question then is this: what answers can we come up with?
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on Jul 30th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
[...] lot of talk about Generation Y recently. Indeed our sister company, FreshMinds Talent, published a report in conjunction with Management Today about how Generation Y differs from Generation X in the [...]