Help Gen Y unlock potential as they redefine workplace success

Although Generation Y is full of innovation, fresh ideas and is technology-savvy, these young people may dive enthusiastically into a project without much information. FILE 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• Millennials are an ambitious lot in career goals, but they need guidance.

Barclay’s Bank’s Managing Director Jeremy Awori’s recent twitter status update caught my attention. “The future will not be a continuation of the past.”

He stated. “The future will be completely different from the past...reinvention is under way”. The key word here is “reinvention”.

As far as generations are concerned, no other group at the workplace has reinvented its approach towards work more than Generation Y. In short, the future is here; and it is not an evolution of the previous generations; it is a revolution of a totally new crop— a reinvented group.

I regard this generation, born between 1980 and the year 2000, also known as millennials, to be potentially the most ambitious lot ever to step at the workplace.

Their potential however remains one of the most delicate conundrums whose realisation unfortunately requires a particular set of hatching and incubation conditions to develop.

With the conditions rightly applied, this generation can be a huge success. Wrongfully applied, it can lead to disaster. To succeed, Generation Y should be attuned to a particular set of conditions which is what I refer to as success accelerators or motivators.

It is impossible to start making a description of this generation without appreciating the central role that technology has played in shaping it. The last few decades in which this generation has grown have also seen the greatest emergence of technological inventions that have grown to shrink the world into a global village.

In particular, two inventions, the personal computer and the Internet are by far the greatest influencers of this generation.

Below are areas in which tech, through the two inventions has worked to create a generational culture.

A gaming and praised generation used to instant feedback.

American statesman Benjamin Franklin said: “We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing” .

By the virtue of their age, Generation Y is barely grown from an age bracket characterised by a lot of play and gaming; probably explaining their youth and exuberance.

However, while gaming has been there since time immemorial, the advent of the personal computer led to the invention of gaming systems.

A lot of outdoor physical games started being replaced by their digital versions as children discovered they could actually play football without kicking an actual ball.

This digitisation of the gaming system created an additional feature that was missing from the original field version – instant feedback.