Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Generation Y: Told We Can Change The World…. But Can We?

Gen Y is motivated to make a difference in the world… Each person has unique talents that are waiting to be maximised.

Scott Asai, Brazen Careerist

As I connect with friends who are new entrants to the workforce, I find that an increasing number of them come back feeling work should be “more than this” and feeling anywhere between annoyed to outright fed up with processes that should have been extinct right around the time of the dinosaurs.

I look at these friends and see people who were student leaders in school, excellent team mates who I’ve worked well with at one point or another and real go-getters, so why the seeming disconnect?

Perhaps we’ve been trained to think, to learn how to be decision makers and knowledge workers. But when we question processes/actions that could be done in cheaper, faster or smarter ways, they’re thrown under the “we’ve always done it this way” bus.

We seem used to solving problems within days when we could make the decisions, but now problems could take months to solve, new initiatives months to be approved, depending on how many hoops your corporation makes you jump through.

In a world where you can reach anyone via LinkedIn and we’re taught to connect to CEOs and build those relationships, these hoops seem counter-intuitive.

It seems Generation Y feels like they graduate from school and get hired by employers who do not know what to do with us and instead slap on “tried and tested” methods of management and work processes that bury Gen Y with what they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be meaningless work, instead of harnessing the crazy amount of energy they possess and unleash it on conquering the world (or some similar corporate goal). Are the unique talents really being maximised? Or are they being utilised the way they always have been utilised before?

It seems they graduate and look at people in the company who have worked for a few years and are settling into “just get by” mode, and can see themselves transforming into those drones in a few years.

Can we change a world that is resistant to change?

Is this the “sense of entitlement” that people claim Generation Y have? Or is it a sign that the workforce is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed?

You tell me.

Tags: brazen careerist, decision makers, Gen Y, generation y, generation y workforce, knowledge workers, new entrants, sense of entitlement, student leaders

Posted in Gen Y | 3 Comments »

My Brazen Experience

Just about a month ago, I got an email from Ryan Paugh, community manager at Brazen Careerist to join their community. It was a great personalised message, telling me how painless it would be to sign up, and that it would be a great place to meet other Gen Y bloggers and that I could always go to him if I had any questions. A great welcoming email.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I saw fellow bloggers Meg Roberts and Corvida Raven and figured it should be pretty cool.

After creating my profile, I submitted a load of stuff and had problems with getting my info saved, so I decided to leave it. Within a couple of days I got an email from Dan Healy letting me know I should update my rss feed so that I could pipe my recent activity to Brazen. So I did. Soon after, I got a blog post featured on the site. Although I’ve been caught up in exams and traveling after that, Brazen has been high on my Google Reader priorities and I try to comment and participate as much as I can.

Why am I blogging about this? Firstly, to share a new connection to a community that I have discovered (or rather, discovered me), which I enjoy very much and more importantly, to tell you why this matters.

One of the links I shared a couple of weeks ago was how to establish a community’s culture, with points like communicating with members, recognising positive contribution as heavily weighted actions that work. If you read my experience with Brazen, you can be sure that these elements were definitely part of it.

If you’re a company hearing lots about this “community” buzzword, learn something from this case study. Community does not equate to sending people mails saying “hi my site is the coolest ever, come join it”. And leaving the site to rot after getting 20,000 people to join it doesn’t make it a success either. If you can’t come to terms with this and aren’t going to be bothered to spend the effort, Don’t bother.

Do you have similar case studies and/or experiences to share? Are you on Brazen Careerist too? Drop me a comment!

Tags: brazen careerist, communicating with members, community manager, corvida raven, dan healy, establish community culture, Gen Y, google reader, meg roberts, personalised invitations, recognizing positive contribution, rss, ryan paugh

Posted in Gen Y, case studies, community | 1 Comment »