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Thanks for this post - I think you are trying hard to understand and explain the world of millennials to those of who are not in that elite group. And that does help me at least try to relate better to your generation in a perverse way. As you read through what I have to say, please don't take it the wrong way - it is not a criticism of you or what you wrote, or even of your generation .. I also just wrote down why what you try to explain away as myths are so easy to believe for someone from the outside. (And, p.s. my own daughter is a millennial and a teacher .. and I have tried to talk to her many times about these things but she puts her hands over her ears figuratively and will not listen or give her own perspective either - but because I know her, I suspect she would write/say a lot of the same stuff you just have if she would talk to me at all. Anyway I DO thank you because you are at least willing to open Pandora's box here online! )
That said though, certain things you mentioned in your post struck me as issues - some of which can be put on to your parents' generation perhaps but many of which seem to be 'excuses' that either almost every generation falls back on as they flounder around in the world as budding adults, like fish just hauled out of the water onto the dock, or are more specific to your generation and how you seem to think you should be treated/how you as a group relate to the world/your expectations that are somehow generationally unique - and unfortunately I expect you are passing the latter on to the next one already - and unless something happens to wake a lot of people up, things will be worse soon, not better.
an informed intelligent society to a group of money-hungry brutes - In my experience, most of the 'money hungry brutes' I have met or known about in life have been white collar, highly intelligent, well educated people. In contrast, some of the nicest people (also intelligent and usually quite 'informed' - whatever that means) I have met are tradespeople but they are not usually money hungry brutes. Are you referring maybe to drug dealers and people of that ilk? Those people who can't look past themselves and their experiences to see the needs and characteristics of others are the people I might be referring to. I think our modern society is full of people like that.
You are now a teacher .. is this how you explain to your students why they need to go to college ? And do you encourage even those who obviously are not college material and/or who have a talent that probably would be better off honed through vocational training or an trade apprenticeship to believe that everyone should go to college? And do you also think that everyone should go to college right out of high school too? They need certain prerequisite academic skills to do anything. They can't even go to trade school without knowing how to read or write, unless maybe they cheat.
if you don't learn the skills and still pass the classes, it's going to eventually catch up with you in the workplace if you can't do the job. - You are very correct but I would really like to know how the message that this is the case somehow managed to get by so many before they went to college. It was happening in high school too which is why so many high school graduates apparently can't even read or write properly when they get to college. I would be looking at teachers, administrators, parents and government to answer for why they let you all think that life was going to be any different than this? What DID they tell you about achievement and life and standards and how to assess what you really needed to get into a particular career, etc.? And again, as a teacher, what are YOU doing now in your own classroom to better educate your students about this facet of real life - to hone their expectations into something more resembling reality so they won't have the same misunderstanding of how one gets through life? Even without being told how things are, what personal responsibility is/was there for people to recognize truth on their own?
A lot of millennials (I'm assuming) got a four-year degree without gaining valued work experience - Here is where society in general went really astray. In my generation, by the age of 12 just about everyone started working at least a part time job (cutting lawns, delivering papers, babysitting, shovelling snow) - that they got themselves and did themselves. They were smart enough by then to find niches in the work arena not being filled by older workers and grab them. They had initiative even then. Even at that young age we yearned for 'independence' and at least intuitively understood we needed to begin preparing ourselves for the real world. By 14 most of my generation were actually working in businesses part time. Many of us worked for less than $1 an hour too - when minimum wage was either non-existent or much higher. I worked after school 4 days a week at a local department store in the office. I learned to manage money (because when I started working, I had to start paying for everything I wanted myself - though my parents still paid for food at home, shelter, basics, of course). I learned self-discipline (I had to be reliable because I had to show up at work or I would lose my job and have to answer to my parents. I also had to bow to authority figures and follow rules.). I learned a more workplace/potentially career-related skill or two as well. I learned what it meant to work hard and gain real self-confidence and satisfaction from a job well done.
Each subsequent generation after mine, including my own, seems to have 'required' less and less from their children. And they also put up barriers as well. I know I tried to encourage my kids to work when they were young but the stuff they were fed outside the home was stronger than that they got inside it - not to mention that the need for, in western society, emerging 'child labour' laws was grossly overblown and misinterpreted as an excuse for laziness - both on the part of kids and their parents. If you had to drive a kid to a job of some kind, it was more work for the parent who also had begun to work outside the home. If the neighbourhood was less safe than it had been in previous years, how could you let your child walk to work? Oh here, child ... take this money and buy that pair of ripped jeans .. I am too lazy to make you work for your own money to buy something we could do in 10 minutes at home with a pair from your existing wardrobe. So I have to go to work so you don't have to. Hmmm. So kids got used to not being expected to do much of anything to support themselves - and in the process lost the chance to learn valuable work and life skills. Millennials are having to give way to the 'snowflake' generation now - and believe me if you are not already part of the snowflake transition period, you will be agasp in a few years at what comes in and after that if you are an early millennial. Slippery slopes are everywhere.
How many in your generation did work when you were young teens or even in college - were expected to, wanted to, tried to, did? I know some do/did but it seems a much less prevalent way to get through one's teen years now than it used to be. It shouldn't take till or beyond college for kids to learn some skills that can be used in the workplace. We already had a resume (and knew how to analyze job requirements and make a tailored resume) that listed useful and transferable skills long before we even left high school, and we continued to improve it as we went through college because most of us had to work our own way through. We learned how to accept rejection, we learned to fail and get back up on our feet with renewed resolve and without complaint, and that we could survive almost anything - we became resilient and flexible as a result. Useful things to note on a resume even if not directly work related. We learned to problem solve and innovate to find those niches that were not filled - not just to pound the pavement or the computer looking for already established 'jobs'. Funny how we could do that but social life and protests and other things seem to take precedence in student/campus life now so who has time to work anyway - other than perhaps working to find someone else to do even your academic work for you? I really feel compassion for your generation, millennials. Some of this is (as individuals) your fault, but a lot of it is not. Society began telling more affluent parents (who had begun to be dual income) that they had to finance their kids educations - and not make the kids work for it or much of anything - and they fell for it ... hook, line and sinker.
I worked with my parents on their job when I was young teenager, but my dad didn't think I was very good. I think I did better than my mother, but that's another argument. Dad would have invested some time in me, but my mom was the one who spent the most time with me and we NEVER saw eye-to-eye...I don't think her goals for me included making me a self-sufficient adult, though. I don't want to go into that, though. Again, though, maybe this problem is unique to me.
the college I attended didn't teach me a lot of prerequisite skills - Now we are really getting into excuse territory. How could you have failed to realize that it was not the college's responsibility to tell you what you needed to do to prepare for a chosen career or to lead you to water and then also make you drink? You chose your college. You chose your course of studies .. didn't you? You did NO research at all before you signed up for higher education in a particular discipline? Why not, if not? Did no one ever teach you to research/how to research/why you should research? If not, I am blown away because you are in the generation that has the most access to the most information quickly of any generation before you. That's the gist of it, but this may only be unique to my circumstances. I stumbled into college by accident. I thought it would be too difficult for me because of my experiences in high school, and I didn't consider myself a smart person, but I found that I did very well, and, to keep myself from feeling shamed by my parents and relatives, I attended college and came up with a career "plan." I had no idea what I was doing; I was afraid to tell anyone, though, because I felt like I was "supposed" to "just know," as if I was getting any information from anyone, except maybe Google.
We were thinking, "get the degree, get the job," or at least I was. Really? Where the heck was your head? .. in the clouds? Was everything just handed to you as a child? Did you get a driver's license when you were a teenager? Did you not realize when you did that the bigger part of learning to drive well actually came after you passed the tests and began actually driving alone .. and that one never stops learning or growing (unless one decides to). Did you not realize that you would not be eligible on day one for the principal's job - or why that would be? Did you not see that getting jobs depended on whether there were any to be had at all and beyond that on your own ability to convince the person giving out the job that you had more on the ball than just 'school learning'? Actually, I wanted to hide my shortcomings. I had this really skewed view of the world. I thought other people thought that people were born with certain innate talents and abilities or that perhaps I was missing some abilities a lot of others already possessed, and I thought revealing that would make my parents, peers, and teachers ashamed of me, so I pretended to know what I did not know and never asked.
(small personal peeve rhetorical question here - How is it that children are not given or encouraged to take on any responsibilities and are held accountable for nothing and are coddled to believe they are perfect little angels and are not allowed to wander out of their parents sight (unless it is convenient for the parent) when they are young, because supposedly their parents want them to have idyllic childhoods and remain kids as long as possible, and yet at the same time, parents insist on sexualizing their kids lives from an early age, making them responsible for social justice and other societal issues, including them in all manner of what used to be solely adult dilemmas, etc.? Does this make any sense at all?) Can't answer for my whole generation here, but for me it was a situation where they gave me a lot of responsibility but no training. I guess they literally thought I was "born with it" or something, although it could be that I just didn't know how to communicate with them. I have ASD, but ASD to previous generations might have looked a lot like technology dependency on us. I really do think a lot of disabled people slipped through the cracks during NCLB and the "no fail" policies in schools.
they made it so easy, isn't it tempting to just take the easy way out? - Apparently your parents and teachers never taught you anything about integrity being important in life, or that you have to earn what you get in life, or that 'stealing'/cheating were bad. So sad for you .. though honestly it is really difficult to imagine how anyone could get to college age and not realize these things for themselves. How is it that so many in your generation don't seem to have any issue if people borrow their stuff and break it or never return it or let you do all the work and use you to do theirs too - so much so that you are surprised when in the real world where you have to work with people not quite accustomed to that kind of liberal 'sharing' stuff think you should actually do the job you get paid for, move up the ladder on merit and not cheat your way to the top? Did 'participation trophies' have anything to do with this attitude? I truly understand 'peer pressure' but this 'groupthink' way of going through life .. allowing yourself to take advantage of every loophole to avoid having to do much of anything yourself ... is definitely going to be (and already is) the downfall of the millennial generation - and those behind you as you rise in the business world - in my humble opinion. People blame boomers for a lot these days but I doubt if this is one of those things most of us are directly responsible for. Yes, I admit that I cheated myself by engaging in some of the legal "cheating," but sometimes I was just trying to get the grade. I didn't really consider it was something that could hurt me until I got in situations where I actually needed those skills, and, luckily, or perhaps unfortunately, I could only do it with select teachers, not everyone.
We replacedmost of our face-to-face communications with instant messaging and video chats. - Yes, you lost the ability to truly communicate with anyone, even your own generation. Apparently you didn't even understand what real face to face communication is about or how real ideas/issues/problems are fleshed out and resolved. When you couldn't spell or communicate, you began to transform the language into 140 character 'sound bites', slogans, misspelled words with different (often opposite) meanings, acronyms and abbreviations - and warped important concepts in the process. You not only locked yourselves in to your own group in so doing, you locked yourselves out of easy access to the business world - you enslaved yourselves in fact - and yes, you also gave yourselves another excuse to say 'no one understands me'. Even those with an IT or mathematical bent NEED well honed communication skills that go far beyond short text message capabilities to work with others to resolve problems and create new things. It seems ironic to me that so many who are all for the 'team concept' that was pushed on them (it seems to me by lazy teachers who didn't want to mark so many project papers or business leaders who didn't want to let anyone know anything outside of a small cubicle-ized process or who wanted to be able to control large groups of people more easily) often cannot 'communicate' well enough to make any team effective and efficient - to the long term detriment of business and the economy in general. Even the ability to 'think' was eroded - and young people got lazy so they just spouted what they were taught TO think - and groupthink became the new way of doing things ... it was easier than actually thinking for themselves. Yes, that's my perspective of how things happened, but I can't say for sure. Maybe it was just my perception. I thought I was working hard, but NCLB (or maybe some other kind of regulation, really meant that our teachers couldn't "push" us like they did with previous generations. School can't be all fun and games, but tell that to the people counting the numbers.
Those of us who experienced being openly berated and abused emotionally by peers and teachers had lasting scars. - I am sorry but this one just leaves me 'smh' as your generation might say. Believe me, many, including me, were not coddled, were often openly berated, and .. oh heck .. who knows what 'emotional abuse' really is anyway - it depends on perceptions, expectations and on both on the giver and the receiver - I could I am sure say the same for my youth but somehow it made me stronger not weaker. Not always the case I realize but in general .. this excuse is not new or specific to your generation. I think your generation is more inclined to exploit it rather than just suck it up, learn from it and move on though. Were they actually killing themselves because of it? I mean, I could be wrong, but I think some of us (the group I mentioned in an earlier post) underwent something far more complicated than mere "bullying."The generations before us didn't know what it really was until it had done it's damage. It was comparable to being singled out due to a disability, and maybe that's what it was. It was one of the main reasons I became a teacher. I didn't want anyone to have to deal with that treatment and constantly feel like they have no reason for being alive. It can hurt academic performance and make children feel like not attending school.
None of this is personal. I don't know 'you' per se - and you probably already realize a lot of what I noted or will soon - but it seems many don't, probably even in my generation. I again thank you for the framework I used above but please know that the use of the word 'you' was mostly not directed at 'you' personally.
Again, maybe some of these experiences are unique to me; I know they aren't all as messed up as me, but I guess I'm one of those "worst-case scenario" members of the generation trying to explain myself.
Well said, and good for you. You know, my generation was criticized a lot too, it was just pre social media. It may seem like there's more criticism of Millennials to you than any other generation, but its because of social media. Of course there are exceptions, and you are one. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, and you recognize that. I'd rather have soeone like you working for me.
Agreed. Social media has a tendency to artificially exaggerate subjective topics such as this. Take a look at the recent election. If I were to place bets on a candidate based purely on the views in my Facebook feed, I would have gone all in on Hillary. It's the echo-chamber effect.
In my workplace, they tend to be very needy. They ask you a question and require an immediate response, like you do when you Google something.
They seem to have a basic entitlement mentality - want to go on the best training trips, want to rent cars when they travel to training (not allowed by my Govt agency).
I actually had one fellow that would constantly ask me for lint rollers, cold meds, Kleenex. I finally just had enough and told him to call his Mommy, she didn't work here.
I hear you completely. We have a new millennial hire. He is new to the area, and is constantly asking for the best "fill in the blank". For being so "tech savvy" he can't seem to use the Google machine very well.
The final straw was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, as he was heading out to the airport to fly home to see his folks, and he stopped in my office and asked if I knew where the library was. Huh? When questioned, he told me that "I needed to take his books to the library, so he doesn't get fined. He just ran out of time". A library, by the way, that was completely out of my way. I told him in no uncertain terms NO, and reminded him that I wasn't his personal secretary. He then whined at me until I told him to quit the whining and learn to be an adult. He's 28 years old with a Masters Degree for pete's sake.
It's Thursday. He hasn't spoken to me since. Guess I hurt the little snowflake's feelings.
So you are claiming that all millenials are autistic as a way to explain away the inability to PAY ATTENTION to a client at a job?
Just wow.
How about instead of pretending this is normal behavior, you put down your phone and do your job? Is that too much to expect? Apparently, yes, yes it is. Employers should start docking pay for every minute they are on the phone. Wonder if that would get the point across.
SMH.
No, I'm just saying that un-diagnosed mental disorders may be a factor, and employers, really everyone, should actually try to get to know their employees before they decide that they are entitled, self absorbed, narcissistic, careless, or absent-minded. I'm also saying that I think that changing modern society has left some of us, maybe most of us actually, without the skills needed to effectively communicate with our fellow older humans or reap the benefits that come with it, like good rapport with bosses and coworkers.
Chances are if it's a social communication problem, they would just replace being on their phones constantly with some other "undesirable" social avoidance behavior, like perhaps staying on the office computer or even burying their heads in a book all day. Find and treat the problems, not just the symptoms, guys. It might be that if people think you expect them to be perfect, they'll do everything they can to make sure you don't meet the real them.
It's not really the employer's job to be a therapist.
I know, but, ideally, a good employer should do what he can to help his employees be productive. If that means having a friendly chat over instant messaging or email about what's really going on, why not?
I know, but, ideally, a good employer should do what he can to help his employees be productive. If that means having a friendly chat over instant messaging or email about what's really going on, why not?
It's time-consuming. Business grinds to a halt if everyone needs hand-holding all the time. This is worlds different from helping a valued and productive employee over a rare difficult spot.
I hear you completely. We have a new millennial hire. He is new to the area, and is constantly asking for the best "fill in the blank". For being so "tech savvy" he can't seem to use the Google machine very well.
The final straw was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, as he was heading out to the airport to fly home to see his folks, and he stopped in my office and asked if I knew where the library was. Huh? When questioned, he told me that "I needed to take his books to the library, so he doesn't get fined. He just ran out of time". A library, by the way, that was completely out of my way. I told him in no uncertain terms NO, and reminded him that I wasn't his personal secretary. He then whined at me until I told him to quit the whining and learn to be an adult. He's 28 years old with a Masters Degree for pete's sake.
It's Thursday. He hasn't spoken to me since. Guess I hurt the little snowflake's feelings.
We can all point out an example of an idiot. What do single idiots have to do with a generation?
Lol for days at these gross generalizations. I knew we'd see that ever-popular and wholly cliche participation trophy remark. I don't ever remember this being a thing during my youth. I never played sports, but participation trophies weren't a thing for my peers and relatives who played sports.
And the supposed helicopter parenting the poor millennial generation endured... what does that look like, exactly? 'Cause that sure wasn't my upbringing.
Lol for days at these gross generalizations. I knew we'd see that ever-popular and wholly cliche participation trophy remark. I don't ever remember this being a thing during my youth. I never played sports, but participation trophies weren't a thing for my peers and relatives who played sports.
And the supposed helicopter parenting the poor millennial generation endured... what does that look like, exactly? 'Cause that sure wasn't my upbringing.
It wasn't mine, either. My parents were too busy to put me in sports, and my teachers and parents gave rewards sparingly. Honestly, a lot of my poor employment and life experiences can probably be blamed on ASD, but I've heard that previous generations who had the disorder did okay in life. Maybe I am a little entitled since learning that I had a disability, but before I was too shy to do anything. At least now I feel like I have an excuse to have confidence. If their experience was anything like mine, though, they have a reason to be a little upset. We bought into a lie that the colleges were happy to tell us maybe, that if we just went to school and got good grades we would be able to find an awesome job. They taught us little about building rapport with employers or gaining work experience; the little career prep they did with us was mostly about resume writing.
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Social media has a tendency to artificially exaggerate subjective topics such as this. Take a look at the recent election. If I were to place bets on a candidate based purely on the views in my Facebook feed, I would have gone all in on Hillary. It's the echo-chamber effect.
Find and treat the problems, not just the symptoms, guys. It might be that if people think you expect them to be perfect, they'll do everything they can to make sure you don't meet the real them. 
