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<\/p>\nIn all seriousness, this was the opening comment of a diversity panel I attended on my first day with my host company.<\/p>\n
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The overall fascination with the work ethic, preferences, and general perceptions of my generation (defined loosely as those born from 1982-1998) never ceases to amaze me. It seems a third of the conversation is centered around figuring out this mystifying generation and how to appeal to it from marketing and sales to human resources, while another third angrily denounces the upcoming work population as a lost cause, and the last third, primarily those of us who actually are millennials, are left to defend our generation and prove these claims wrong. (I\u2019ve never heard a millennial say, \u201cYes, I am lazy, unproductive, and don\u2019t know how to communicate.\u201d<\/i>)<\/p>\n
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Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, as this Charles Schwab blog<\/b><\/a> points out, Millennials surpassed the Baby Boomers as the nation\u2019s largest living generation in 2015 according to the US Census Bureau, so it\u2019s a good idea to gain an understanding of each other. Here are a few of my favorite Millennial Myths debunked:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n “How can someone who has a degree and work multiple jobs to make ends meet be considered lazy and unproductive?\u201d\u00a0 – Huffington Post Blog<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Individual stereotypes aside, the most damning case I\u2019ve read thus far addresses the overall problem with generational stereotypes at work,<\/b><\/a> based on a doctoral dissertation of an educational leadership PhD, the findings of which were recently published in \u201cUnfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit From Ditching Generational Stereotypes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n She concludes: “There are a million factors that go into determining the kind of person you are when you grow up, and this arbitrary 20-year-long age bracket that is widely accepted is not one of them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In all seriousness, this was the opening comment of a diversity panel I attended on my first day with my host company. The overall fascination with the work ethic, preferences, and general perceptions of my generation (defined loosely as those born from 1982-1998) never ceases to amaze me. It seems a third of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,407,33,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-workdetroit","category-detroit-businesses","category-work","category-work-detroit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"IMG_0753\"](\"http:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/IMG_0753-300x225.jpg\")
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<\/a>instead of \u201cworking our way up.\u201d I would first point out that instant success and hard work are not mutually exclusive. If anything, the entrepreneurial CEOs of startups have had to work just as hard if not harder than many of us starting out in an entry level position, hoping we will get noticed after putting enough time in. Second, I spent the first five years out of college with a bank, averaging 12 hour work days and frequent\u00a0weekends,\u00a0because I desired a long term career with a stable company that offered ample room for growth. I would hope many of us can agree 60+ hour workweeks is not “lazy.” Moreover, not only me\u00a0but many of my Millennial colleagues at the bank shared this sentiment and therefore did not fit the blanketed stereotype that “Millennials frequently want to change jobs” and\/or “be entrepreneurs.”<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
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![\"IMG_0713\"](\"http:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/IMG_0713-300x169.jpg\")
Millennials don\u2019t know how to communicate – <\/b>\u201cThey\u2019re always on their phones.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to have a conversation with them.\u201d These particular commonplace stereotypes strike me as a complete oxymoron. Technology is quickly becoming the primary method of communication across the globe. And while face to face interactions are invaluable and at times necessary and irreplaceable, more often than not the pace at which we\u2019re doing business today and the global interconnectedness requires us to communicate electronically. Do I prefer to text or email? Yes. Perhaps it\u2019s a result of growing up in an environment where service jobs were categorically outsourced and automated (notably, by the very \u201ccost-saving\u201d baby boomers who are sometimes the quickest to criticize). Nonetheless, in my personal experience communicating electronically enables me to work most efficiently and remain organized. I would suggest that Millennials’\u00a0attachment to technology is merely a different form of communicating. And as the above UXC Professional Solutions infographic points out, Baby Boomers are not very adaptable to change.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n![\"IMG_0795\"](\"http:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/IMG_0795-1-300x222.jpg\")
This research basically concludes there\u2019s not a lot of hard data that supports any of these generational assumptions and the Millennial generation doesn\u2019t actually have any unique attributes. It discusses the tendency to overglorify and overhype the Millennial issue particularly exacerbated by the media to maximize readership. Interestingly, the author points out that \u201ccharacteristics often attributed to millennials, such as a lack of employee loyalty, extreme technological savviness, aspirational career ambitions, social responsibility, etc., are, if ever, fair characterizations, merely attributes of various life stages.\u201d<\/p>\n