jul 23rd, 2010 by Guest Blogger
By Blake Sunshine*
The hardest part about growing up is figuring out what you want. For a lot of Gen-Y’s this means deciding what to do after graduation. But even years after graduation, the journey of knowing what you want never seems to end. Figuring out what you want is hard, but it becomes so much easier if you allow yourself to be honest about your journey.
When the Lakers won the final game of the NBA championship, Ron Artest thanked his doctor and his psychiatrist. “Thank you so much,” Artest said, “There’s so much commotion going in the playoffs. She helped me relax.”
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Tags: Blake Sunshine, Gen Y, Ron Artest
Posted in Generation Y, Millennial | No Comments »
jul 19th, 2010 by Guest Blogger
By Carol Phillips*
At over 80 million strong, Millennials are a consumer market force today and will be even more important in the future. According to Alloy Media, the college market alone is made up of a record 16 million young adults with collective economic power of over $300 billion, $69 billion of which is discretionary. Yet economic clout is only the most rudimentary reason marketers should be paying attention to this cohort. Young adults today have greater influence on consumer behavior than their enormous spending power even suggests.
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Tags: Marketing, Millennials, trends
Posted in Generation, Generation Y, Marketing, Millennial, Technology | No Comments »
jul 15th, 2010 by Sarah Newton
By Sarah Newton
I do think when it comes to managing Gen Y we are missing a trick.
We talk a lot about how Generation Y are good at asking for what they want and fantastic and speaking up, putting their work-life balance at the centre of what they do, all of which I think are great attributes. However we don’t take enough advantage I think of their fairness attitude. Most employers find them very difficult to manage, purely due to their inability to get Gen Y to sometimes share another point of view, which I think is a youth thing rather than a Gen Y thing.
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Tags: Gen Y, Millennials
Posted in Artikullocks, Generation, Generation Y | 2 Comments »
jul 13th, 2010 by Guest Blogger
By Carol Phillips*
Financial services are waking up to the potential of Gen Y consumers. Millennials may not have a lot of money now, but they are determined to pay down their debt and conserve resources for the future. Coming of age in an era of massive financial uncertainty, they may even come to be known as “Gen Frugal”.
That’s good news for community banks and credit unions which are all about helping moderate income people responsibly manage their own money.
Last week I was interviewed by Myriam DiGiovanni of the Credit Union Times. She wrote an article titled “Forget the Cool Factor, Focus on Millennials’ Needs” based on our talk. Here the full article (bold face mine):
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Tags: Financial Services, Gen Y, Generation, Generation Y, Millennials
Posted in Generation, Generation Y, Millennial, Web | No Comments »
jul 6th, 2010 by Sarah Newton
By Sarah Newton
As England comes home defeated from the World Cup, it becomes so obvious that there is lack of good talent coming up through the ranks of sport in the UK and it seems that this skill shortage is hitting hard.
My eyes were recently drawn to an article in Construction Manager (my hubby is in the field) entitled, “Industry is storing up trouble over skills shortage, reveals CIOB survey.” http://www.ciob.org.uk/resources/research
This survey reveals that the industry is laying the groundwork for an on-going skills crisis. A third of respondents said that the recession had resulted in reduction in graduates at their firms, while 20.3% said it had stopped altogether, with 32.9% saying that apprenticeships were down and 17.5% stating that they had stopped apprenticeships altogether.
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Tags: Gen Y, Graduation, Students, University
Posted in Artikullocks, Education, Generation, Generation Y | No Comments »
jun 29th, 2010 by Sarah Newton
By Sarah Newton
This is a post that I have wanted to write for so long and no, I haven’t been procrastinating, I just needed to get an inside ticket, so to speak.
In the UK there are a few amazing companies that have been started by Gen X ( of Gen Jones for those of you who are into generations in a big way) that are walking and living examples of how to run companies that Generation Y want to work for. However, there is no company that has done it better then the guys at Innocent Drinks. I have already talked about this company before. They are living, breathing examples of building a business based on real values through and through and Gen Y fall over themselves to get a slice of the Innocent pie. Richard Reed, Adam Balloon, Jon Wright, now 36, started their business in 1998 with a clear goal to get fresh healthy drinks out to the public, and they did it in a very quirky way.
I have always had a sneaky suspicion that these wonderful, rebellious, middle class Gen Xs, determined to do everything a different way, had built a company that not only appealed to but valued Generation Y’s qualities and that they had managed to build something quite unique, a company that values above all else its young employees. However, this was all just hearsay; I needed to see for myself, so after a few years of trying I finally managed to get a ticket to their AGM (a grown up meeting) where I, along with loads of other people, spent the day with the crew at Innocent.
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Tags: Gen Y, Generation, Generation Y, Millennials
Posted in Artikullocks, Generation, Generation Y, Millennial | No Comments »
jun 22nd, 2010 by Guest Blogger
By Carol Phillips*
The Internet is a modern day three ring circus: there’s something cool going on everywhere you look. According to Comscore, 45% of all page transitions are ‘link following’. Every web page offers multiple enticements to move on. To create interest, you must say something worth staying with, in other words ‘relevant’.
Keeping Gen Y’s attention in an environment defined by distraction requires being ‘interesting’.
Gen Y blogger, Meg Roberts, wrote an article titled “How I would market to myself’ in which she offers this advice:
“Focus on adding value rather than overloading on content. The best way to ensure we’re listening to your messages is to make them relevant to us. Learn why we’re in a given community, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or an iPhone app, and speak to us without severely interrupting what we’re doing .”
Note the words “without severely interrupting”. When creating messages for Millennials, it’s important to ask whether or not the message meet the test of whether it’s worth interrupting.
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Tags: Engage, GenY, Marketing, Millennials
Posted in Generation, Generation Y, Marketing, Millennial | 1 Comment »
jun 17th, 2010 by Sarah Newton
By Sarah Newton
There has been little talk up to now about Gen Z, but I can see a few things coming up through the ranks. A recent post has claimed that they are more like Gen Y than Gen Y. Saying that, they are more connected and more comfortable with technology – well of course it is all they have ever known! At 9 years old, my daughter has her own web show, her own Skype and plays computer games while talking for hours to her pal over the Internet.
However, to me this is a little on the surface for Gen Z. Because they have mainly Gen X as parents, they have something that Gen Y did not have and that is realism.
While the Baby Boomers molly coddled their little Gen Y, Gen Z will have none of that!
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Tags: Gen Y, Gen Z, Generation, Generation Z
Posted in Artikullocks, Generation, Generation Y, Generation Z | 2 Comments »
jun 14th, 2010 by Sarah Newton
By Sarah Newton
OK, I can hold my containment no longer and I have to shout from the rooftops. I am so excited about the coalition agreement made in UK politics between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, mostly because I am so excited to have Nick Clegg in a senior position. While I did not really favour Cameron, I must say that throughout this whole process, he and his party have handled the situation with grace, humility and a spirit of collaboration which we, as a generation, have never seen. But mostly what excites me is a shift from baby boomer leaders to Generation X leaders.
Baby boomers are notorius for having a great vision and assuming that we will all follow suit. They want to help and can mollycoddle; look what they did to their Gen Y children, they were the original helicopter parents! Generation X on the other hand are so much more individualistic and as such, more likely (as we have seen) to preach personal responsibility, which I believe will fill the gap I see so often in our youth.
For these of you who are not aware or familiar with Generational Theory, Generation X is commonly abbreviated to Gen X, the generation born after the baby boom ended, with earliest birth dates used by researchers ranging from 1961 to the latest 1981. In Generation Theory, generations are split into four cycles, describing their job in the world, so to speak.
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Tags: Baby boomer, Gen X, Generation, Generation X
Posted in Web | No Comments »
jun 1st, 2010 by Guest Blogger
By Carol Phillips*
Nearly 20 years ago, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book that theorized a 22 year generational cycle based on repeating generational archetypes called simply “Generations“. They called these cycles ‘turnings’. Children raised during a particular Turning share similar historical and cultural experiences, which results in their being like each other, and different from other generations. This was to my knowledge the first appearance of the word ‘Millennials’.
A chapter that begins on page 335 of 427 (paperback version not including Appendices and Sources), is titled “Millennial Generation”.
What makes this chapter on Millennials so fascinating twenty years after it was written is how uncannily it matches what we know to be true of how Gen Y is different from preceding generations.
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Tags: Education, Gen Y, Generational Cycle, Millennial
Posted in Education, Generation, Generation Y, Millennial | 1 Comment »
