Millennials: Overly Sensitive or Rightfully Annoyed?

In the latest Real Simple magazine there was an article, 5 Things You Shouldn’t Say to a Recent College Graduate. The five things were:

“What Can You Do With That Degree?”
“You Should Go to Law School.”
“Do You Have a Job Lined Up?”
“The Economy Has Been Bad Before. You’ll get through it.”
“My Fill-in-the-Blank Relative Just Got Out of College, and She’s Doing Great!”

Now I am hesitant to agree that these are comments people should avoid but most of this is dead on with what our generation is hearing straight out of school (or even before we graduate). I have a journalism degree and as I was getting ready to graduate I heard more than once, “ouch, that is a hard profession to get into now.” Most of the time I wanted to yell, “YES I KNOW. But I am working on it.” Like I have said before, Millennials chose to major in professions they were/are passionate about, to avoid working a dead end job just to make money. Some day we will laugh at those who asked, “What Can You Do With That Degree?” because as they said in Real Simple, “Today’s economy is rapidly evolving, and many new grads will end up as freelancers or entrepreneurs and perform jobs that don’t exist right now.”

No one has ever suggested for me to go to law school but more than once it was suggested that I should think about graduate school. My response was always, what would I go for? The longer I am in the working world the more I realize at this time experience is much more preferred than the degree you have received. If anyone suggests law school or just graduate school to you post graduation Real Simple suggests, “People should first spend a few years exploring to figure out what engages their passions.” If you explore and find out more schooling is what you need, than you have obviously found something you are passionate enough about to further your education.

I think before graduation we all heard, “Do You Have a Job Lined Up?” This is definitely one I say to ignore and hope people are not asking on a regular basis. In my experience it was harder to find a job before graduating than it was after graduating. The only people I know who had a job set up before leaving school were those of us doing another internship (me!) or those who were accounting majors (and they had technically already worked for these companies during their “internships”).

It is true that the economy has been bad before but according to recent reports graduates in this upcoming class are graduating into the worst economy thus far. According to the Huffington Post, “The youth unemployment rate is double the national average. The average college student borrower graduates nearly $25,000 in debt; Americans now owe more in student loan debt than credit card debt.” I think it is safe to say we don’t need to hear, “Buck up! It will get better.” We know it will get better but we are concerned with what we can do right now to make it better. Real Simple suggests, “Spend time making profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook appear as professional as possible. That’s where employers are looking for new hires these days.”

As for the last one, “My Fill-in-the-Blank Relative Just Got Out of College, and She’s Doing Great!” I’d be annoyed if anyone said this to me, especially when I know many people have to work more than one job to survive on their own. Take it with a grain of salt and know that you are doing the best you can. A lot of hiring today is through current employee referrals, so if you are feeling snarky, suggest this successful relative pass your resume on to their manager. It couldn’t hurt, right?

Girl Power? Not at the office.

As female Millennials we grew up idolizing the Spice Girls, where everything was all about the empowerment of females through music. This wave of “feminism” created a self-reliant attitude among young women of the 1990’s that manifested ambition and individualism.

As millennials entering the corporate world we may find the girl power and peace signs no longer apply when dealing with our same gender bosses. As Meredith Vieira said this morning on the Today Show, “If you have lofty career goals you may not want a woman as your boss.” Recent studies have shown that twice as many men and women prefer male bosses to those that prefer female bosses. This insight even has its own term: The Queen Bee Syndrome.

“The Queen Bee boss is the alpha female who tries to preserve her power at all costs,” says Today Show contributor, Dr. Robi Ludwig. “Instead of promoting her younger counterparts, she feels threatened by them, judges them, talks about them and, in many cases, ends up obstructing their attempts to climb the corporate ladder.”

Many women involved in these studies have found that their female employers have a lack of trust and because these women have fought to get to their top ranking positions are hyper-competitive with their younger counter parts. If this situation becomes your reality it is important to consider if you can continue working for this female and to look inside yourself and confirm whether you could be doing more to help your situation. If you still come up with the Queen Bee Syndrome, it may be time for you to move on.

But since we are the newbies entering the workforce, is there anything we can do to overcome the Queen Bee? Strive for success. As more women enter the corporate world, more will expand to take on management roles. This will help to reverse the competitive spirit allowing female bosses to find their own confidence in the man’s world they have worked so hard to overcome. “They'll even become the nurturing, supportive bosses that social theorists always believed they could be,” says Dr. Robi Ludwig.

Don’t Fear the Millennial

It’s a scary time in the world for Baby Boomers. The number of Millennials is said to be almost 77 million, born between 1981 and 1999, which is almost equivalent to the baby boom between 1946 and 1964. But do not fear the Millennials entering the workforce, we are not out to change the entire corporate mindset that you have thrived in for decades. After reading the article, Closing The New Generation Gap: Gen Y written by a baby boomer, it is easy to see why some of our elders are hesitant to hire us.

I constantly hear that Millennials have a sense of entitlement, that we expect large salaries and corner offices right out of school. When in reality I think if a corporate company invested in these young workers what they invested in our parents, there is a very good chance that we would be just as committed to the corporations as they once were. We don’t want to jump from job to job but we do know that we have to find somewhere that fits us because as Millennials we will be working longer in life than our parents will.

Gen Y’ers are just like any other generation, we long for a job that offers flexibility and the ability to balance work/life. But we know we can’t be that picky. Hate to say it but in an economy like the current one, we can’t wait for the position that will allow us to come and go as we please. As someone who works 40 hours a week at a desk, I know I’m glad to see a paycheck and benefits even without all the flexibility that I think anyone wishes for, not just Millennials.

Where this article really lost me is this, “Gen Y’ers like to work with their friends and they are more inclined to develop romantic relationships on the job. It is important for employers to tighten up or create policies that address fraternization in the workplace.” Millennials are not stupid and most of us are quite business savvy. Just because a relationship may develop through work does not mean that any of us will be in the storage closet or having a lover’s dispute in the middle of cubicle country. I know plenty of work relationships where you would never even knew these people knew each other let alone dated.

A request to future employers take the time to meet with Millennials, look past the experience you are asking for and see that these educated young adults are quick to learn and aren’t out to take your jobs - at least not for a while :-) To end it this baby boomer did sing our praises:

“They are entrepreneurial; they are open to change and amazingly optimistic — traits that are much needed in the workplace, now and in the future." - Cheryl Pignotti

Stop Giving Millennials a Bad Name

Okay, Matthew Klein with the New York Times, I’m not sure I understand what you have to complain about in your recent Op-Ed article from March 20th, “Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated”. You (obviously) have a freelance situation with one of the biggest news organizations in the world. Not only that, but at the bottom of your editorial it says you are a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. I think it is safe to say you may hear your friends plights regarding the current state of jobs for Millennials but you personally can't gripe too much. And before you start comparing the United States' under employed Millennials to those leading the revolutions in the Middle East, I have a few corrections to some of your thoughts:

“My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009, and could find paid work only as a lifeguard and a personal trainer. Unpaid internships at research institutes led to nothing. After more than a year he moved back in with his parents.”

You cannot even compare the unrest in the Middle East to the Millennials unemployment rate in the US. Most of those young students in the Middle East would cherish the opportunity to be a personal trainer and a lifeguard. At least their bills are being paid and those jobs, while they are not glamorous, are respectable.

“The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money.”

Yes, having a job is a reward for the work you did from Kindergarten through your senior year of college, but just because we all aren’t working in a corner office with a view right out of school does not mean we have lost faith in our future. If anything it has personally driven me to seek out what it is I want to do with my life. Maybe journalism was my dream but dreams can change with circumstances, and I’m not saying I’m giving up completely but I can alter my dream of a newsroom position to more of a content strategist for a growing business or even marketing and PR.

Millennials may have a less than desirable jobs, and we may not be able to purchase a quaint little ranch with a white picket fence but we can afford to pay rent at a pretty snazzy residence and enjoy life with continuing aspiration and drive to find that ultimate career. So please (Matthew Klein's of the world) stop making us seem ungrateful and whiney to future employers, if potential bosses believe we all think like you we will inevitably get passed on for our biggest competitor, the recently laid off baby boomer.