Generation Wired Goes To Work: 5 Tips for New Grads and ‘Old’ Bosses
Posted Under: Email Best Practices,Email Etiquette,Email Expert,Information Overload
Check out our article, just posted on Fox Business “Generation Wired Goes To Work: 5 Tips for New Grads and ‘Old’ Bosses
Here’s an excerpt – you’ll have to go to the article for the 5 tips!
More than a million students graduate this month and are ready to enter the workforce. However, at a time when these former students willingly admit to being tangled in an endless web of distractions, employment could present their greatest challenge yet: staying focused for an eight-hour day.
While there is always some doom and gloom surrounding the work habits of the current stock of college grads, this year raises questions that may justify the concerns. How will graduates deal with digital distraction and information overload in the workplace? Will it be hard for a generation that grew up with the Internet to work for a generation that didn’t?
What are YOUR suggestions for new grads and/or “old bosses”?
Reader Comments
I don’t care about the age of the new employee or the age of the boss. It’s about productivity. Don’t assume that a new graduate is going to bring the bad habits of his/her generation into the workplace, but the burden of proof is on the candidate. Look for clues before making the job offer. Weed out anyone with a poor work ethic.
Let’s suppose that only 5% of the new graduates you would otherwise hire (or retain) are sufficiently focused. The other 95% exhibit the stereotypical deficiencies of Generation Wired (e.g. distracted throughout the day by communications unrelated to the tasks at hand). Limit your hiring to the five percent! If you need more people, look to those who graduated before 2011. Generation Wired will get the message. That is that only good behavior is rewarded. The other 95%, unemployed because they didn’t initially get with the program, will include some intelligent enough to adapt to the expectations of the real world. Don’t hire them until after they adapt (and can prove it).
Multitasking is a myth. The new graduates are not nearly as good at it as they think they are. Any job that requires deep thinking also requires relatively long blocks of uninterrupted time.
By hiring a new graduate, you’re getting someone whose education is fresh in his/her mind and someone who comes at a bargain price. But if your new employee doesn’t know when it’s time to work and when it’s time to play, I’m telling you that it’s a false economy.
P.S. Hey, kid. Lose the black shirt and bad hair. John T. Malloy writes, “To avoid looking like a gangster, always make sure that your shirt is lighter than your suit, and your tie darker than your shirt …”. I say, if you don’t wear a suit, replace the word “suit” above with “pants”. Molloy also makes his case for “the power of a haircut”. Just get the book: “John T. Molloy’s New Dress for Success”. Much of the content remains relevant today, or you can figure out how to make it apply to 2011.
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