The baby boomers are retiring in significant numbers, taking with them their collective expertise. This gap will be filled in part by the retiring generation’s children, those born in the early 1980’s.
In order to attract this group in sufficient numbers, the industry needs to re-assess some of its core ways of learning and rewarding. What exactly will need to change?
The industry model for rewarding and developing staff owes more to the legacy of the 1960’s than it does to the new millennia.
The focus is still on developing an accumulation of specialised knowledge within technical areas in order to create internal scalable efficiencies. Traditionally this model worked and lead to employee loyalty and ever increasing material wealth.
However, the so-called digital natives have heralded the real change. They work best addressing parallel processes and multi- tasking. They have little patience for long lectures or in-depth detail – they’ll just download this when they need it.
No, they want to go faster, less step-by-step, more in parallel. They expect that cross-functional projects will be the norm, not the exception.
They want breadth not just depth and they learn to understand complex issues through gamified situations with immediate feedback on success or failure. Instant rewards are more important to them than their bosses or pensions and long-term incentives become less relevant. It almost goes without saying that career loyalty is a mental model from a previous generation.
The ability of today’s managers to re-align learning to the new criteria will go a long way in deciding how digital natives view the industry and how well we can recruit those critical new employees.
