‘Young Professionals’ Perspectives on Work, Career and Gender’

Organisations are exploring the needs and perspectives of Generation Y to understand how they can be managed. This generation has grown up with technology, they are completely comfortable with technology and technology has shaped their interactional patterns. Another characteristic of this generation is constant reflection on the relationship between self, work and life. This reflective nature provides a perspective in which younger generations have the opportunity, or challenge, of choosing a specific life path where one can reinvent oneself multiple times throughout life.
For this London Business School report, 42 multi-national individuals born between 1977 and 1987 were interviewed. Interviewees were clear that the most important aspect to a career is challenge. A career should challenge the individual to foster growth and development, or most individuals would consider moving on. The second most important aspect of careers was self-improvement. Whether formal or informal education, this generation wants to avoid stagnating. Other highly ranked aspects to careers were enjoyment and colleagues. Most did not want to feel as if they simply have to work, they also want to enjoy their jobs and the people they work with. Many young professionals talked about their colleagues as friends and saw them as an important aspect of having fun at work.
“As Generation Y enters the workplace, inter-generational competencies are more necessary than ever to both attract and retain the newest top talents,” says European Diversity’s Michael Stuber. Fortunately, 25% of companies surveyed in the Second European Diversity Survey (EDS2) stated that they had plans to focus on intergenerational teams and 37% of companies had plans to foster a new culture of openness and trust for transferring experience and knowledge. Many good practices in the area of age diversity confirm that this issue has become a focus of many Diversity strategies.
For more information on our Second European Diversity Survey, visit: here . For a copy of the report on young professionals, contact office@european-diversity.com.