Millennials in the Workforce

Via the provocatively-named Die, Boomer, Die, I found an interesting piece from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the challenges and opportunities of integrating Millennial-generation employees into workplaces and businesses which were created and dominated by Boomer thinking:

In the workplace, [Millennials] are going to expect responsibility, independence, creativity and respect. They may express a preference for working in teams. Most expect to hold four to six jobs in their lifetime.

They will want a voice in things that affect them, and they may request job sharing and telecommuting opportunities.

And the onus will be on employers to satisfy — or lose — them.

This is interesting, and it reminded me of something I read way back in 2001 in the now-defunct Context magazine, with Royal Dutch Shell Executive turned London Business School Prof. turned Social Philosopher Charles Handy talking about the paradigm of the Elephant and the Flea, about how the most winning players in the economies of tomorrow would leap away from elephantine corporate employers to strike out on their own:

It seems to me that large organizations are increasingly going to be young places. Starting out, people will have apprenticeships in large organizations. After 10 to 20 years, they will either jump or be pushed out of large organizations and live a more independent life.

Five years ago, 66% of corporations in Britain had just one person in them.

This is less common in the U.S. because medical insurance is so expensive. That is a huge drawback that deters people from going out on their own. This is something that must be reformed soon because I believe the future belongs increasingly to the independents.

…

Being a flea isn’t all bliss. Adapting to life as a flea is dramatic.

You need to belong to something. If other people don’t matter to you, you don’t matter to them. So, you have to build your own community of mattering with friends and colleagues. But, if it becomes too formal, you constrict yourself.

Handy may have mis-calculated with his prediction that younger workers would spend a decade or two toiling as corporate apprentices — in fact, it seems more likely to me that corporations will become increasingly grey places — but his predictions of independence and self-defined communities seem to be bearing out so far.

This is all pretty interesting to me because I’m a business owner and the “old man” of the company at the age of 27. My experience of employment and workplace is a-typical, but it seems clear that things have changed quite a lot over the past twenty years or so. Corporations are no longer objects of trust, and the rise of the Creative Class seems to be a real phenomena. At the same time, the servitude industry (McDonalds, Wal*Mart, the GAP) still dominates many people’s career options.

What are your thoughts about the future of work and employment for our generation? What about unions? Are self-employed and freelance unions the future, or will we see some new form emerge to organize workers around their mutual self interest?