The New Workforce: Generation Next (Generation Y) in your Organization

1. Introduction

Fifteen years ago a new employee with the federal government was in the office break room and found an interesting note on the union reading board. The note was in response to an intern questioning the union's emphasis of supporting management-union agreements favoring promotions based more on an employee's time in service and less on the employee's competency. In the note, the union representative rebuked the intern's comments and stated that "younger employees need to wait their turn and pay their dues because that's the way the world works".

The young employee's initial response was that neither management nor the union was likely to look for his best interest as well as he could do for himself. The rules he would follow and the pace he would advance his career would be of his own choosing. The employee's attitude of taking charge of your own career was pretty much typical of the generation entering the workforce in the late 1980s and 1990s; now identified as Generation X (Zemke, Raines, & Filipczak, 2000, p. 104). Fast-forward back to the present and the same not-so-young employee that was in the break room fifteen years earlier is finding himself no longer the "new employee".