Monday, October 22, 2007

Gen Yers Care

In my English 101 class, the students are doing a unit on work, which will ultimately lead to a research/observation paper about some aspect of working. Since I'm a GA, I don't teach every class, but I am teaching all next week. While browsing around the net for some teaching ideas, I found an interesting Time article about Gen Y work ethic.

Some of the stuff reported in the article surprised me. While I'm well aware of the tech savvy workforce Gen Y has created (and I feel as if I betray my generation by not knowing HTML), Gen Y's trends toward opportunistic job seeking, working with friends, and volunteering is very thought provoking. I can see how members of my generation are primarily self-interested (and thus less loyal to companies which we assume will screw is over in the end), but the volunteerism is interesting. Perhaps Gen Yers are padding their resumes with volunteer experience as a self-interested way of getting ahead in the work world.

Also, note the trend among recent college graduates who move back in with their parents while they search for jobs. This provides a cushion between rent-and-utilities-paying adult life and mom-does-my-laundry student life in which twentysomethings can take time to find higher paying jobs without taking the financial risk of moving out on their own. Personally, I'd sooner live in a cardboard box than move back in with my parents, but I can see how the comfort and stability of living at home until something better comes along is appealing to some my age. Being an adult is scary sometimes.

2 comments:

Jenn said...

I'd also prefer to live in a box than with my parents! Luckily, I was able to find a job and a cheap place to live...

As far as the list on the side, it is dependent on your template. I use the template editing tool in blogger, which allows you to easily edit the existing template. It looks like your template has all those arrows and stuff. Are you playing with the editing in blogger?

K T Cat said...

Very good post. I linked to it here.