Ronald Paul Hill, 2002, Managing Across Generations in the 21st Century: Important Lessons From the Ivory Trenches, Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol. 11, No 1, pp 60-66.
Interesting comments about the confusion of input and output with the Gen Y students and that stemming from over praise the effort they put into things as children, not the end result. That does seem to conflict with the outcomes based university courses rather than effort based. From my point of view as Gen X, if you can do it, great! Who cares how much effort you need to put in. Yes, we’ll go the hard yards if needed, but if not, we won’t. We want the end result. Maybe coming from all those video games with the aim on the final score or beating your mate! So we do need to show why the outcomes are important not just the effort that is put in, but without stopping the will of the student to still put the effort in.
Self paced work and lack of deadlines probably contributes to this problem. If there are no deadlines, then students will not learn to be able to deal with deadlines. Employers need to keep the employees happy and pander to them instead of the other way around. I guess this is saying that Gen Y don’t ever have to do it tough!
Gen Y has been raised to value their own personal development, that just needs to be channeled such that the company’s benefits are in line with the personal development.
They are saying that there is a lack of intrinsic motivation for Gen Y to follow their passions due to those careers not earning them enough money. That is indeed interesting considering that these students are used to doing what they like in a way and timeframe that suit themselves.
Gen Y have been pushed into so many things by their parents that the focus was not really on enjoying any of them, but just going through the motions. Well that explains why they are not motivated to work but are still willing to do it to achieve pay even though they are not passionate about it. Also, with the time management, doing so many things and not really focusing on outcomes could be why they have unrealistic expectations of how many courses they can do at once and they are used to just doing many things and filling all their time with different activities. Just a pity that they never really get any outcomes from any of them because time is just too pressed!
The article does raise issues of teaching Gen Y. What it doesn’t consider is teaching Gen Y right alongside Gen X and Baby Boomers and everyone in between. If we meet the issues of Gen Y, then for sure, someone else is going to have a lesser experience!
No comments:
Post a Comment