I respectfully disagree with your sentiments. What the Millienials have learned is job skills are King. In order to acquire those job skills, one may have to hop around rather be pigeonholed into a job that take years to move up in.

Why should I stay at a job when I saw millions of Americans lose the jobs at companies they had been at for decades? Only to find themselves unable to return to the job market years later on the government dole.

Also why should I care about your companies long term interests? Given that just about any company could drop me like a bad habit with just seconds notice.

If you want to hire me, you need to make it advantageous for me to stay. The work needs to be challenging and I need to gathering some new job skills to stay relevant in the job market. If the job fails to challenge me then I will move on.

How can you expect loyalty when it so poorly rewarded these days? It may be different at your company but overall companies have made it clear through their actions they don't value loyalty. Given that, no one hardly complain when the new generation comes around into the labor market and they have no loyalty to offer.

I just want to point out it is a two way street and Millienials behavior is completely reasonable considering recent history of the labor market.

Haha! That's great!

I once dated a math grad student in college, who went on to be a professor. Does that count?

I've had a few soon-to-be and recent college grads ask me to coffee because they want to learn more about freelancing/running your own business. I've definitely seen this entitled attitude in them. It really makes me feel old.

Great point. I've found that a lot of times companies will lie to make themselves and the position look more appealing. This is especially true in fields where the competition for good talent is stiff (ex. technology).

This is actually the reason I left my last "corporate" job. I quit after 60 days.

Best of luck in your business. I left the corporate world to start my own company 4 years ago. It's a great opportunity and a huge challenge. And if I hadn't done that I never would have had the chance to work on the Atlas Shrugged trilogy.

Good point. High school tells you college is the answer. College tells you you're entitled to a $50,000 starting salary.

The truth is not everyone needs to go to college. I certainly didn't. In fact, I would trade my college degree in for student loan forgiveness in a heartbeat.

We need to push apprenticeship programs and internships.

However, business are part of the problem here as well. Many companies require a degree when it is entirely unnecessary.

Example: My grandfather was one of the early computer programmers at Cincinnati Bell. He taught himself how to program off of video tapes. He had no degree. Today, you need a masters degree to do the same job.

Agreed. It's like me giving medical advice... after all, I did take a medical terminology course in college so I'm qualified, right?

I hear ya brother, and let me tell you, those same boots changed the way I parent, cause I won't let my kid be like that. Kid falls down, I watch and wait for her and say, you fall down, you get up, that's life. Wife says I'm being mean and that I should help her, so I remind em both, my job is not to raise a child, it is to train an adult.

Now, when we are around others, she falls down, she gets up, and the other parents are surprised she didn't cry or anything (even when she whacked her head hard enough it may have been warranted) and went right back to playing. I tell em it's no surprise, it's smart parenting. I teach my daughter that crying means you need help, so if you fall down, don't cry about it, get up. They give me strange looks, but all acknowledge that she is happy, has more fun playing and spends less time crying. I tell them they better learn now, or some day their child will work for mine... until she fires them for being a crybaby.

I had a roommate once who was, and probably still is a college math professor. Smart guy. A grad student came to the house for tutoring on something that was so far beyond me that I don't even remember what it was... and then the conversation turned to career advice.... I jumped in, shot the prof in the face, and told him he had no business giving career advice anymore than I had being a math tutor, because he had NEVER actually HAD a regular job. I took over, explained that life sucks, you aren't special, and no one will care that you are a 'hot house orchid', so you better tough up, work had, and be thankful for every opportunity that you win, but you must win them, cause in the real world fair is a very different concept. Prof was slightly offended until I reminded him, in front of the student, that I was a high school grad, not a college grad, and made more than him, while having my ongoing technical training paid by my boss (so no student debt) because I followed my own hard learned advice.

Then I made the kid go to the corner store and buy me a soda, cause knowledge isn't free.

Hey kid, if you ever read this, let me know how it worked out for you.

"But I think maybe a company should not expect much loyalty, if it hires people from outside"

A critical observation. In my experience, the companies which hire outside to fill leadership roles do so because they have such a short-term focus that they utterly fail in that critical area of employee management. Managers should be getting to know their subordinates: their personalities, their specialties, their institutional knowledge, their expanded knowledge, and their aptitudes. Then they should develop with those employees a plan for their future growth and development within the company. There are always going to be some who are content to stay where they are. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and these people form the backbone of your company. There should also be a small contingent who are looking to move up the ranks: to challenge themselves and take on more responsibility. These should be identified as well and presented with a path - even if that path is likely to end up outside the company.

I agree that it is pretty hypocritical to expect loyalty and do nothing to deserve it. Loyalty is earned, not demanded.

So wake up boomers, and fix it. You can control who gets elected if you stop listening to statists.

There will always be exceptions. I should have clarified that this revolves much more around specialized positions than entry-wage jobs. I was looking at the examples from the articles where the Millennials were all about corporate ladder-climbing without actually having done anything. That says nothing about your particular situation, since I knew a couple of Med Techs and their whole job is roaming around working largely as independent contractors as you describe.

I also don't want to imply that I don't support the notion of wage competition: I absolutely support the idea of employees seeking to better their station and that the result of that in the market is better wage equilibrium. That being said, however, I also point out that much of wage inflation is driven not by actual production, but by government-induced inflation.

There is also one more difference between you and many of these millennials: you actually are cognizant of the actual value of your work. That to me is the biggest missing factor in what I deal with in Millennials.

Well said.

Hear, hear!
The fault lies with the generation that grew up in the Depression. That experience toughened them and prepared them for WW2. They defeated the biggest war machine in history, God bless them.
When they came home and settled down, they decided they didn't want their children to experience any sort of deprivation, and unwittingly created a generation of spoiled pansies.
That's where the rot set in.

True, they've no idea of the cost's involved never mind the Big picture...they just think that the original creator of that business should do it for free.

They do not get the financial cushion needed to do business within business cycles, not to mention the continuing costs of innovation and competition.

If it wasn't for all these things...there wouldn't be jobs in the first place and it is clear, no matter how one observes reality...mankind Needs to be productive otherwise there is no point in living.

blarman -

I am not a millennial, but have experienced being an exception to your rule 'not to say that you expect to stay only a year' at a particular job. As a Medical Technologist who liked to work graveyard shift, I was quite upfront with my prospective employers about my plans, and I do not think my saying as much ever impeded my getting a job...but then you are talking about a niche where I can get 3 days - 1 week familiarization and then begin working independently.

That being said, Schuyler House has contrived a hideous plan to lure unsuspecting millennials into staying with us: We are nice. We have a casual atmosphere. If you have a dog (or social cat) you are kinda expected to bring it to work. And - importantly - we realize that people have other things in their life that are of great value to them, and we not only cooperate with working with these other things, we actually encourage them. (Currently, for example, several of us are working together on an Indie film in progress...not ready to say more at the moment.) The company takes us all out to movies a few times a year; the Missouri office has barbecues too.

Our pay is not great, and while we do get people moving out and up to better jobs, we have had a pretty good retention of some brilliant people. In an era where corporations are trying to drop their employee health coverage, we have just arranged to get our people the premier policy offered by a particular insurance company...because we want to be sure that our people have absolutely no problems in getting their health care. In more than one way, this is a 'lifestyle' company.

Jan

Of course millennials follow a Bell curve, just like most other things do. You, Snoogoo and awebb and others are welcome to be exceptions to the norm. Your mere presence on this site is evidence that you self-select to be part of a non-normative group.

What is the rug that is pulled out from under you.

Jan

So. I wonder why you consider a manual-labor job to be the sweet spot in your career. Would you mind elaborating a bit?

Jan

awebb -

That was a good read, especially the conclusion. The problem as I see it is not in that everyone considers themselves 'special', but that you have to ante up 'a lot of hard work' in order to merit the term.

It is the old saying, "You have to walk the walk and talk the talk." If you can just 'talk the talk' then you are not entitled to be termed 'special'.

Jan, 'special' (but sometimes meaning 'the short bus')

I completely agree that just as in any other trade, the employer-employee relationship should also be a mutually beneficial one. I also agree that where the employee views his relationship with his employer as a one-sided affair, he may feel justified in job-hopping. I point out to the savvy employer and employee alike, however, that turnover is incredibly inefficient for both sides.

Where to start . . . I'm a "pre-boomer" or what used to be called a "war baby." My parents struggled through the Great Depression and WW II, so the Calvinist ideology of "work hard, and if you don't succeed, work harder" was what I learned. My father changed jobs quite frequently, but then as a master craftsman he usually had little trouble finding work. The difference, as I've witnessed it, was that no one told him he was "special," and he was motivated to demonstrate how valuable he was. The companies he worked for valued him, and Lockheed made him one of the very few lead engineers without a degree, which finally gained his sense of place, and he retired from that company.

I appreciate the contributions of our resident millennial, awebb. We haven't done our offspring any favors by trying to protect their self-esteem, and they are downright delusional about how they think the real world is supposed to work.

However, in the dynamic IT world, companies have become downright predatory, sucking in the naive, chewing them up with slave labor hours, and spitting them out when they begin to get expensive. Is it any wonder, in a world with no corporate loyalty to the employee, that the employees don't feel obligated to the company?

It is not the millennial that should be shaken. The elders are guilty. Yes, US. I delivered papers at age NINE and TEN. We passed laws prohibiting this. I taught English at age 16 to Egyptian nationals. The US no longer permits this. We have abrogated individual rights and fostered a nanny-state for so long that our millennials are reaping (raping) the entitlements of a bankrupt country.

I'd work more than two years for you!

0 is a boomer; that explains him.