cohort

Wow, Venkatesh G. Rao writes the article of the year, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War.  I'm going to have to reread this article and do some reflection before I have anything of value to add.  Please do yourself a favor and read this article.

Note: Social Media, Social Publishing, Social Technology.  I wish we could all settle on the same term.

Seth Gottlieb, Content Here, recently turned me on to Sacha Chua and her blog.  Sacha is an Enterprise 2.0 consultant and application developer for IBM and she also happens to be a very good blogger.  What makes her blog interesting, besides being well written, is her posts on corporate use of social technologies given from the perspective of her generation, the Millennials (latest hip word for Generation Y).

While some organizations are still debating about introducing Web 2.0 technologies to their employees, this newest generation now entering the workforce is likely to expect that such technologies are already available to them for use in their daily work tasks.  While the use of information technology is often viewed by companies in terms of staying competitive and a requirement for implementing strategic plans, the technologies are also increasingly becoming an essential tool for the human resources department.  If you're expecting to attract and keep bright educated Millennials such as Sacha within your organization, you then need to better understand how people in her work cohort are likely to process the work given.

Baseline reports that demand continues to increase for qualified people in the information technology field.  This demand is in part due to the number of the baby boomer generation retiring within the next 10 years.  Also, the decrease in students choosing a major in computer science, engineering, or mathematics isn't helping either.

In the article, Demand for IT Admins Hits Five Year High , a survey found strong needs and increasing salaries for IT professionals for the following computer administration work:

Another Generation Y (Generation Next) in the workforce has been written.  This time the article is at Infoworld and titled, The Generation Gap Challenges IT Managers.

The gap is widening, with more workers stacked at both ends of the age spectrum. There are approximately 80 million Baby Boomers, those born roughly between the years of 1946 and 1964, and 70 million in Generation Y, born 1978 through the present, but only 60 million in the middle in Generation X, those born 1965 to 1977.

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That creates a cultural divide, as workers of different ages will generally hold different views of technology use and adoption.

To be honest, I still like my old paper on the subject, The New Workforce.