Well, if you’re asking me specifically, I did have a job my last year of high school, and I did work during the summer and during college, albeit 10 hour workweeks while the semesters were going. And thankfully my college work was in my future career path. I don’t consider a job at a cafe or Best Buy to be particularly “career building”. It instills a work ethic, but doesn’t necessarily set you up for a professional environment where you are paid a salary and expected to work on projects over months. That’s what I took Dinsdale to mean as “preparing themselves for the job market”. To me that means something more than simply getting a job at a cafe. Networking, professional recommendations from the field, getting your hands on stuff you’ll actually do in your field, visiting a workplace in your field, going to job fairs, etc. And most employers in a career type field will dismiss job experience like cafes and retail out of hand because it’s not “in the field”. It might not be fair, but it’s the truth. So a lot of kids are getting a wakeup call that mowing lawns over the summer isn’t good enough to start a career from.
ETA: Oh, I just saw that you’re the same person. Wow, I feel silly. You know what you meant better than I thought :smack: From my experience that is the truth up there though.
I don’t want to speak for Dinsdale but to my way of thinking “right or wrong, the boss is the boss” has nothing to do with abusing employees or expecting loyalty while giving nothing in return , but rather with the employee recognizing that he or she does not determine what their job is or how it is to be done.
Some of the younger new employees (late20s/early 30s ) at my agency have had a tendency to think that after all of four months on the job their opinions are as valuable as people who have been in this field for twenty or thirty years. Saying you think that doing X is better than doing Y once is fine, but at some point you have to recognize that "the boss is the boss" and just do it the way he or she wants it done. The younger new employees take longer to get there than the older new employees (and yes, they are older. When we hire,the new employees are often in their 50s and 60s. Even a couple over 70)
We have been under a hiring freeze for almost six years. The recession has also kept a lot more “old timers” on staff who would have otherwise retired. So the unbalanced age structure of my workplace is very obvious to me. Lots of gray-haired folks. Quite a few salt-and-peppery folks like me. But not very many young people
I wish we could get more of them. Our jobs are technical, and lots of the older folks just don’t have the technological prowess that young people have. Even if a fresh college graduate doesn’t know all the Excel or Access do-hickies, they are trainable. They are hungry to learn. But a lot of my colleagues are too scared to learn anything besides how to delete emails. They still think it’s fine to produce technical documents without charts or maps. Not in the 21st century, it isn’t.
So give me more young people any day. They spend a lot of time surfing and texting? Who cares. As long as they produce results, they can do whatever they want.
My mom made the same observations her last few years teaching sixth graders (she retired a year ago). I think she’s full of it. Even teachers are not immune to confirmation bias. Which students does she remember fondly, talk about, send Christmas cards to, follow on Facebook? The rock star, hardworking, very bright and wonderful students who grew up to be some really stupendous human beings and kept in touch with their sixth grade teacher because there was a special connection there. So that’s largely how she remembers the classes of 20-30 years ago. She conveniently forgets the other 26 students in each class of each of those years that she fondly but disparagingly always referred to in private as “stones and mushrooms”.
I’ve noticed, from hiring people to work with us, that a lot of kids starting their first proper 9-5 work aren’t well prepared. It’s as if they haven’t learned yet what work is. This is the 17/18 age group which I’ve been working with for over ten years. As far as generational differences, when I was a teenager (1990s) it wasn’t uncommon for kids to have part time work from age 14 on, maybe even younger. In more recent times due to a number of factors there isn’t the work there for that age group. Having said that, the younger generation, coming of age during this (from their perspective) very long recession, seem more serious about work than I was or my peers were at that age in the '90s.
One major difference between the generations, as others have pointed out above, is the ubiquity of mobile phones. Years ago most of the kids had phones but they would have only really checked them on their breaks. Now, if it’s quiet, the kids will go straight for their phones in work. It doesn’t bother me unless they do it to the detriment of work that needs doing but I suspect their heads would explode if I told them they couldn’t use their phones during working hours.
Well, I’ve long, since I turned 22, felt that males after high school should spend four years in jobs that are strenuous, disciplined, and, most important, someplace where I am not. Maybe the military; maybe bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps. Just let them burn off their excess testosterone and energy away from respectable adults. A kid (turned 21 yesterday) at work spent 45 minutes making a sale (a little long, but it was a sale), and all through it he tossed a small pillow nearly to the ceiling over and over, driving me crazy. I didn’t ask if he had forgotten to take his Ritalin, but just sat and stewed because I’m old and my leads were shit.
OTOH, another guy, not as old as I am but old enough, has been complaining about how boring these bad leads are. I want to stuff his head through his monitor while saying, “If you didn’t drag out the time between your calls–did some fucking work instead of crossword puzzles–your time would pass faster,” except these flimsy flatscreen monitors wouldn’t do enough damage.
I know of one grocery store chain where checking a phone while at a work station is a firing offense, regardless of the job title. If someone needs to reach you at work, they can call you on the switchboard.
Walgreens is doing this, and the long term care pharmacy (i.e. they serviced nursing homes) I worked at briefly in 2011 hired a new graduate to be their pharmacist in charge. He was quite vocal that he didn’t want to do this, but otherwise, he would not have had a job.
I was a contract employee, and left that job because I got another one, but I knew almost immediately that I didn’t want to sign on their as a regular employee for a multitude of reasons, the main one being that the regular employees were having a lot of difficulty getting paid.
Bear in mind that to generations BEFORE yours, 24-hour workdays were unthinkable. They worked in more shop-like, often unionized environments, with more set and preditable hours, and it would never occur to do anything like that.
The idea of working around the clock in a job that does not involve matters of life and death does not strike me as being industrious. It strikes me as being remarkably stupid. It’s not good for you, it’s inherently time-wasting in accordance with Parkinson’s Law, and so will result in worse work and worse employees.
Heh. I just joined a department with ‘Technology’ in its name. I’m the only person under the age of 30 (most in the 45+ range). All my coworkers are either talking about how many years until retirement or what activities their kids are in. It’s so weird, I think I’m the youngest person on the entire floor.
I think one big thing about my generation is that we don’t like the idea of having x amount of hours of work a day when the work day is x+y hours long and having to hang around (obviously production industry as opposed to service). Older office workers are used to having 4 hours of work a day that they drag out to 8 to look productive. Many older people think the amount of time you’re in the office is indicative of how productive you are, when it isn’t. It’s like asking ‘why?’ as a child and not being given a reason, just being told that ‘because I said so!’.
But my parents also worked to instill a good work ethic in me, so I figure if I show up on time, put effort into my work and act friendly I’m already ahead.
If someone needs to reach you at work, they can call you on the switchboard.