I’ve been trying to think of a good way to talk about Gen Y and the workforce/workplace and GigaOM has provided an excellent jumping in post about Gen Y and their relationship with IT. They have all the information around how Gen Y interacts with these groups but miss one critical point: Gen Y is better at IT than many IT professionals.
Your typical Babyboomer IT professional was introduced to computers as part of their job. They learned it as it came out and they were forced to either adopt it or support it. Your typical Gen Y worker has lived with it their entire life and can generally diagnose and fix most problems faster on their own than by calling for help. This presents a problem not just for corporate IT but for corporate managers in general.
When asked to solve a problem my first instinct is not to pick up the phone and call an “expert”, it’s to hit the internet and find the best sources of information to start from. Too often the information I find in a 5 minute Google search is as good or better than the information I get from the expert. Colleges reinforce this behavior because you are generally forced to come up with answers independently and it’s inconvenient to wait for office hours for general assistance. What this means is that you end up with an entire workforce of smart people who can become instantly good at solving problems on their own without the need of the expertise of their more experienced colleagues.
In Real Estate this presents a problem for us Gen Y’s because it de-emphasizes the importance of relationships. Most of the people in my generation are really good at socializing casually but have no experience at working professionally with others or establishing non-social relationships. Some may read this as a desire for instant gratification, but in reality it’s the confidence to find any answer we need instantly. The flip side is that Gen Y has difficulty with understanding how to build relationships to get the deeper, non-researchable answers that take time.