WHY TRAINING MEANS A LOT TO MILLENNIALS
By Evan Hackel
When baby boomers took their first “real” jobs upon entering the workforce, their demands and expectations were ridiculously low by today’s standards. On their first day on the job they got an employee handbook that they took home and scanned while eating dinner or watching TV. Company training, if there was any, was minimal.
For the most part, they accepted the idea that it was normal to feel ignorant and unskilled in the first weeks or months on a new job. Tey expected to “learn the ropes” by making mistakes.
When it came to promotions, most boomers were equally willing to proceed by trial and error. Nobody told them, “Here is just what you need to do to get ahead in our company ... here is the next position we’ll be considering you for.” One day in the hazy future, they hoped that their bosses would call them in and say, “We just gave you a promotion ... you may leave early and take the family to dinner to celebrate.”
Was there feedback? Of course, there was. Tere were quarterly, semiannual, or yearly job reviews that usually followed the script, “Here’s what you’ve been doing wrong, here’s where you need to improve—so do it, session over.”
In short, many baby boomers were happy to toil away in black boxes, learning jobs and building careers in a loose way that would seem absurd to the members of today’s younger millennial workforce.
Ample research documents that millennial attitudes are different. One major study from Gallup, “How Millennials Want to Work and Live,” reports these findings:
• 60% of millennials say that the opportunity to learn and grow on the job is extremely important. In contrast, only 40% of baby boomers feel the same way.
• 50% of millennials strongly agree that they plan to remain in their jobs for at least the next year. Tat might sound like a big percentage, but 60% of members of all other groups plan to stay in place for at least a year. Baby boomers and others are planning on sticking around, while millennials are weighing their options.
Learning and Training Are Key to Retaining Millennials and
Maximizing their Productivity Findings like those—and you can easily find more— document that millennials are more likely to be engaged and to stay on their jobs if they have opportunities to plan their career paths and learn.
Here are the trends:
• Millennials like to feel capable and confident in their jobs. Millennials do not like to feel like rookies. Many think of themselves as leaders—or as leaders who are waiting to be discovered. Tey want to look good, and thrive on being able to confidently contribute from the first day they arrive on the job. Te right kind of training—both for new and current millennial employees—makes that happen.
• Millennials are usually skilled students.Tey like to apply the learning skills they built while they were in school. To them, learning feels as natural as eating three meals a day. As the Gallup study found, they are eager to learn. In contrast, getting baby boomers to believe in training can be a harder sell. Tey tend to view training as a burden, something they have to endure. Millennials say, “Wow, when can I start?”
Millennials Have Far Different
Expectations and Demands Boy, have things changed. Today, most millennial workers would object strenuously to the same kind of conditions that baby boomers (and members of the generation that preceded them) thought were normal. If today’s millennials start new jobs and discover conditions like those in a new workplace, they are going to start looking for new jobs in a matter of hours.
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• Millennials are tech-friendly. Most of them love to be trained on their mobile phones and tablets, which are the most powerful training options available to many companies today. Te result is better knowledge transfer, even to groups of employees who work in multiple or far-flung locations. Baby boomers, in contrast, are more tech-resistant. Tey are likely to freeze and resist when they hear they are going to be taking company training on their smartphones.
TPI Turf News November/December 2017
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