Business and IT executives who brush aside the impact of the younger generation will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
How much do you think a third-grader could help you in your job? Not at all? Depends on your profession? Depends on the job you want the third grader to do (maybe it’s just to leave you alone while you’re working from home so you can accomplish something)?
For those who don’t have kids in this grade, they are 8 or 9 years old, and learning grammar and sentence structures, multiplication and division.
At one large Michigan school district, for example, they’re coming up with new ways to leverage IT. The IT staff depends on non-IT folks (teachers, administrators, students) to approach them with everyday problems so IT can come up with a great way to resolve them. In fact, some students even come up with the IT solutions themselves. The youngest age this manifests? You guessed it--third grade.
Considering we’re starting to see children as young as first grade with mobile devices, MP3 players, laptops, and advanced video games, this actually isn’t too surprising. Technology isn’t an isolated part of their lives; it’s integrated into most of what they do, whether it’s a school project (many students now do video reports rather than book reports, for example), a remote video session for students who can’t make it to school, constant connectivity via text or video messaging on their mobile device, or instant access to the Web to get immediate answers to any question that enters their minds.
Company executives--across all areas of the company, not just IT--need to spend time now evaluating how this younger generation will affect the company, and how the company can position itself to benefit from it.
Already, the expectations of employees between ages 20 and 30 are markedly different than those older than 30. And as the under-20s enter the workforce, their impact will become profound. Essentially, consider them to be “wired differently” than their more seasoned counterparts.
Sure, every generation is different. But anyone younger than 30 is quite a bit different in how they grew up with technology--and we’re not talking Pong or Pac Man. Those between about 20 and 30 started using home computers generally during their teen years, and they were among the first who wouldn’t even think of going away to college without a laptop. Sure, some between the ages of 30 and 40 took desktops and later laptops to college, but that was the exception and not the rule.
Kids and young adults born roughly between 1990-2000 started with computer games, which became more and more advanced very quickly--often outstripping the capabilities of the PC. That meant parents had to upgrade PCs way too often. They shifted quickly to Web-based gaming and virtual reality gaming devices such as Wii. They never really used email, but relied heavily on instant messaging until about 2005, when they shifted to MySpace. By 2007, Facebook took over, along with mobile devices with text messaging, Web access, and later, specific mobile clients for social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flicker.
Kids born after 2000 are relying heavily on mobile devices, text messaging, and video chats. Many start using mobile devices by age 5 (whether their own or their parents’), and they get their own between ages 6-12.
So what does this mean for the younger workforce? Here are the common characteristics we see:
* They have no tolerance for delays. They want instant access, instant information, instant resolution. The expectations of IT infrastructure and support will go up a notch.
* They have at least some rudimentary programming skills. They learned them designing their MySpace pages. This can be a blessing or a curse: They could write applications to help IT; or they could write rogue applications that cause security and bandwidth problems.
* Video chats, instant messaging, text messaging, and social computing are part of their brains. They can’t imagine life without them. We have seen more than several instances of two companies vying for a talented young professional with comparable offers. The company providing access to these technologies, along with an iPhone and their choice of laptop, wins every time--all other things being equal.
* They understand how technology makes them more productive. One of my favorite examples of this involves one of my daughters. Last fall, she applied to a Big Ten university while sitting in the back seat of the car while the family was heading out of town. Within 45 minutes, she had applied to the university from her iPhone--including writing an essay! (She found no problem with it, and indeed, there obviously wasn’t, since the university accepted her.)
The last example is an important one. They simply function better with the tools that give them instant gratification that the issue at hand is done. For example, a young sales executive is completely miffed by the fact that he can’t access customer information, inventory data, and the order-entry system from his mobile device. Why would anyone go back to the office to check this, play phone tag with the decision-maker, and extend the sales time by days or weeks? That’s a valid question--regardless of the sales executive’s age!
Business and IT executives who brush aside the impact of the younger generation will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. They won’t attract young, innovative talent, nor will they benefit from the unique and productive ways they use technology.
