South Carolina is bringing apprenticeship back
Posted On January 6, 2015
With the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas, America largely lost the master-apprentice model of skill development. College transitioned from liberal arts to business prep. With manufacturing making a comeback, the need for vocational skills is growing and the labor force is not keeping up. In 2007, South Carolina recognized this gap and implemented an apprenticeship program with 777 individuals across 90 companies. In 2014, there are more than 670 companies participating and the program has reached 11,000 workers. NPR recently reported on the success of the S.C. program. Part of succession planning is passing along institutional knowledge from one generation… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Training Industry, Work, Workplace
Millennials making their mark in small business
Posted On December 26, 2014
When Bank of America issued its semi-annual report on small business owners this fall, the focus was on generations, specifically Millennials. That may have surprised many of you right off the bat – Millennials are the youngsters, how do they have sufficient trends as small business owners? Remember, they aren’t all fresh out of college anymore (the oldest are in their early thirties), their parents are often Boomers who are ready to retire and pass down the family businesses, and they are very entrepreneurial as a whole. As with everything they do, Millennials are approaching business ownership differently. When reviewing… Read More
Categories: Entrepreneurship, Generation Y / Millennials, Work
Don’t follow your bliss
Posted On October 23, 2014
Have you seen this story? Mike Rowe, the guy from the FORD truck commercials and Dirty Jobs, responded to a fan with an answer that would make many managers give him a standing ovation. The fan was asking Rowe why he should not follow his dream; a reaction to a Ted Talk where Rowe told the audience that “follow your dream” was awful advice. Rowe, a young Boomer, told the fan, whose generation is not disclosed, that “Passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by.” Rowe is known for Dirty Jobs and his new… Read More
Categories: Work, Workplace
Do-it-yourself customer service? Yay or nay
Posted On October 16, 2014
Back in the day, if a customer had a question, she went to the office or store and spoke to the manager. Perhaps she called on the phone. Either way it was a one-to-one conversation. The same was true with making a purchase. A person selected what they wanted, brought it to the checkout and paid a real, live person (and usually with cold, hard cash). Today, customers can engage in entire transactions – from purchase to return to replacement – without ever speaking to a single person. And while I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been frustrated by the… Read More
Categories: Product Design, Work, Workplace
Is an ethics course in order for the Millennials?
Posted On September 25, 2014
The workplace cliché of the boss who makes the young staffers do all the work and then takes all the credit may be meeting its match. A new study by marketing firm DDB found that 27 percent of Millennials had taken credit for someone else’s work. And that’s just the ones who would own it. Comparatively, 15 percent and 5 percent of Xers and Boomers, respectively, admitted to the same. So what’s driving this seeming underhanded behavior? And how does this reconcile with a group that we’ve called social and altruistic? According to the survey authors, it’s the old dollar… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Work, Workplace
Gen X – stuck in the middle again
Posted On August 5, 2014
The numbers show it. And so do the conversations. Generation X is stuck in the middle. In “10 things Generation X won’t tell you” MarketWatch author Quentin Fottrell delivers a fairly thorough assessment of why Gen X is “poor, ignored and jaded.” Gen X numbers roughly half to two-thirds of its generational peers. Depending on whose statistics you use, there are about 49 million Xers compared to 75 million Boomers and 89 million Millennials. No wonder people aren’t paying as much attention anymore. But it’s more than that – Xers have been around a while. They were the thorn in… Read More
Categories: Generation X, Succession Planning, Work, Workplace
Searching for role models, Millennial women still come up empty
Posted On July 31, 2014
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made big waves with her book, Lean In. But a recent study of Millennials, conducted by Bentley University’s Center for Women in Business, seems to agree with her assertion of an ambition gap among female workers. According to the study, while nearly 20% of Millennial women seek to emulate women leaders in their companies, another 20% have “no interest in becoming a leader at my current company.” Of course that leaves a good majority floating somewhere in the middle. It’s even more interesting when you apply the assumptions these Millennials are making about the women CFOs… Read More
Categories: Generations, Parenting, Work, Workplace
Truth in advertising vs. telling them what they want to hear: A recruiter’s dilemma
Posted On July 29, 2014
The Millennial workforce rivals Boomers in size, but not necessarily in availability. This creates an interesting conundrum for recruiters. While there should be more supply than demand (and in some industries there certainly is), companies are still competing hard for the best talent. Those with traditional business models, such as public accounting, are particularly at odds with the Millennials’ more relaxed approach to work. How do you entice with promises of work-life balance in a business with a “busy season” that has young employees averaging 60+ hour work-weeks? Very carefully. Maybe the balance isn’t about the number of hours worked… Read More
Categories: Work, Workplace
Rules aside, your employees are talking money
Posted On July 29, 2014
A new LinkedIn study on relationships at work is making HR directors across the country cringe. But not for the reason you might think. Despite many companies having direct rules prohibiting it, more than two-thirds of Millennials are comfortable sharing personal information—including salary—with their coworkers. What’s fueling younger employees to commit the ultimate faux pas? The potential reasons are many. Millennials are, in general, more liberal in their thinking. They don’t hold as strictly to social norms and traditional boundaries. The internet certainly plays a role – this is a generation fully accustomed to revealing private information to strangers, so… Read More
Categories: Generation Y / Millennials, Work
Out of the mouths of baby boomers. Or is that Xers?
Posted On July 8, 2014
I was scrolling through the online news when this caught my eye “I think (Generation X) is the last hardworking generation[…]Generations after us have become more spoiled. Kids aren’t disciplined.” And if it weren’t for the parenthetical I would have drifted right on by, expecting yet another complaint from a Boomer against the Xer work ethic. Except perhaps we’ve outgrown that one. Apparently the Xers are claiming a spot on the “back in my day” soapbox. Was it only a matter of time? The quotes are from an article discussing the Pew Research Center’s series “The Next America.” That series… Read More
Categories: Generation X, Generation Y / Millennials, Work, Workplace