Generation Y

by Mark Sanborn and Eric Chester After graduating from college, Eric started his career as a high school business teacher and coach. Mark launched his career selling in the magazine business. Do you remember your first job? I mean your first time in a “real” job, an honest-to-goodness, full-time job after you completed your formal education? Odds are, you reflect on it as both a challenge and a rite of passage. The challenge came from acclimating to something new and learni

The most common adjective used by today's employers to describe the young emerging workforce is 'entitled'. While there are many exceptions and contradictions to any demographic stereotype, this label that young employees are having a difficult time shaking implies that they act as though they deserve more than their employers feel they are worth. The reality is that employees are entitled to certain things (i.e. a safe working environment, ethical treatment by management,

I am a music lover. My iPod is bursting with tunes from every genre imaginable. Although I always tend to gravitate to oldies, classic rock, funk, 80's, and even my dad's elevator music, I have great respect for a lot of the new stuff coming out today. Bruno Mars is an artist that will be around for many years. If you saw his performance on the recent Grammys, you know how phenomenally talented this 27-year-old is. He's kind of Elvis meets James Brown meets Prince. I am

In 2004, I presented my Employing Generation Why keynote speech to about 300 sales managers of Southwestern, the renowned educational book publisher and distributor headquartered in Nashville, TN. With a 150-year history of getting top-quality college students to forgo their entire summer vacation to sell books door-to-door on a commission-only basis, Southwestern is unlike any company I have ever heard of or worked with, and they are remarkably effective in building core wor

Think 'lack of work ethic' of the young workforce is a criticism leveled only by American employers? Think again. This story from the U.K. tells the story of an owner of a large farm in England whose frustration with young job seekers has escalated to the point he is publicly lambasting--and even boycotting--the teen job applicants coming from the local Jobcentre. "They have no work ethic and unfit for the labour market," 54-year-old Richard Haddock says. "They turn up lat

Pull any manager aside and ask them to describe the emerging front line workforce and terms like ‘entitled’ and ‘poor work ethic’ will enter into the conversation. I interact with thousands of managers in the hospitality industry each year, and this I can say with certainty. At last year’s CHART conference in New Orleans, a regional training manager for a large restaurant chain lamented to me, “the work ethic has gotten so bad that our people are in the perpetual mode of tryi