Generations Blog

Everyone remembers the teachers who droned on in the class, hour after hour. They remember the hundreds of dollars they spent on college textbooks that were never read. They remember struggling to understand complex subjects when instructors provided less-than-clear examples. The students within the digital ethnography department at Kansas State University have taken all these faculty members to task in a short video entitled “A Vision of Students Today.” Continue reading “Students Destroy Classroom Myths!”

Isn’t it ironic that we spend ten times as many hours deciding which $5000 piece of equipment to buy as we do hiring the $30,000-a-year person who will run it? As much as many elements of the selection process have changed as new generations have entered the marketplace, the interview seems to have remained the same. Yes, the questions have gotten better in some cases, but we still sit down across the table from the applicant Continue reading “A Better Solution to Sit-Down Screening”

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the premire performance of Up With People’s 2008 debut in Denver, CO. For those of you unfamiliar with the organization, Up With People was founded in 1968 during turbulent times in the US for the purposes of spreading goodwill throughout the world. As much as we sometimes complain about those under 25, Up With People is one of the finest examples I can think of where young people contribute positively to society thru their efforts. Those I have known who have traveled with organization have emerged Continue reading “Up With People is Back!”

I am 52 and first went to work back in the 70s with an understanding that loyalty was an important part of the employer/employee relationship. The organization takes care of you and you take care of the organization. I dare say that most of the Baby Boom was indoctrinated with the same message. Of course the premises of this underlying assumption began to unravel in the 1980s as recession and corporate restructuring altered the relationship between employer and workforce. While it had a direct and, in some cases, devastating impact on those in the Baby Boom, it also affected their offspring. Children watched as parents came home without a job, harboring a sense of betrayal that they had been done wrong.

Over the past three decades, corporate and organizational restructuring has evolved into a continual process, so much so that the expectation of job security has been all but obliterated from our way of thinking. During this same time, two more cohorts have come of age, Generation X and the Millennials. In this post, I’ll address Generation X and their attitudes and strategies for managing their transactional behaviors. In the next, I’ll address Millennials. Continue reading “The Boomers’ Guide to Managing the Transactional Xer”