Generations@Work

Last week was hard for everyone. I certainly was not in the mood to blog about young people in the workplace. But on a week when our culture of violence again rears its ugly head, I spent three days visiting colleges with our youngest son. The campus tour and info session is a straight up marketing pitch, which I suppose is as it should be. What amused me was how many questions came from the parents, but that’s not why I’m writing this morning. From the very first info session Tuesday I started listening for key words coming from the admissions personnel and younger tour guides. By the end of the week, and at the end of the fourth campus visit, one got the pattern. So here are the key words as I heard them:

community, collaboration, global, change, involvement, service, participation engage, create your own (ok this is a phrase), independent, team, multidisciplinary, diversity, internship, job, mission, consortia, focus, self-directed, travel, cafe (not cafeteria), challenge, network, green, environment, wellness, responsibility, growth, imagination.

There are more but these are the key words that just jump onto the page.

Now, a few caveats. Three smallish and one big school in New England hardly represent a sample to the several thousand campuses across America. So, I’m not trying to make some grand statement by pointing out this list. But, nonetheless, the repetition, and in most cases the apparent sincerity of the presentations, leads me to believe that at least some of these schools take these words seriously. I can’t help but think that there aren’t a lot of typical and normal young people heading off to college who are not in some meaningful way influenced by the social experience embedded in this constellation of words. If education shapes attitudes, and attitudes influence behavior, then this seems to me to be important.

I suppose if you’ve been involved in any way in higher education, you might now be saying, “this guy is just seeing this now?” Well, yes. Our oldest son just graduated from college in December, and I know we visited a lot of schools back in 2002 and 2003. But for some reason this consistent voice, heard across several campuses, didn’t make the same impression on me.

Employment recruiters, I strongly suspect, can recite this list from memory, and add more key words. But it is still the case that few companies or organizations are taking this list seriously when it comes to strategic workforce development. I strongly suspect that the leaders at the top are still tone deaf to the sea change occurring in the attitudes of younger people towards work and the work place.

But if you are a senior manager or business owner, or just someone who thinks you are clued into the important stuff taking place in the culture, you might want to take this list, pass it around, let some folks in your organization edit it, or amend it, but don’t ignore it. Now, having done this, hold your final list and then create a key word list describing your organization. Compare the two. If you don’t see a lot of similarities, you’re in trouble. And before you dismiss this whole exercise as foolishness, your recruiters have been trying to show you this list for quite a while.