Category Archives: personality

Are you Generation Y? You Should.

Generation Y are people who tend to be born between 1983 to 1997, and can be sometimes be called

Millennials. They are ‘peer-oriented’ (which explains why Facebook is so popular), don’t look at jobs in the traditional sense, and are comfy with gadgets.

I love working with them. They’re quirky, fun, groupish but not clique-ish, and have good working habits. I teach voluntary classes to teens around 15 to 19, and they’ve got entire books loaded onto their cheapish phones, talk about the latest movies and gadgets, but seem fine not owning them. It’s more of a really big club than a generation.

Anyway, you don’t have to ‘get’ Generation Y. Generation Y gets you. They’ll fit in mostly anywhere, and you’ll want them around cos they’re the people who know Facebook and ipods better than anyone else. And they don’t sound geekish either. Geek for the masses.

How this compares to life - I don’t know. I think that it helps me get an understand of where the world is going, and that ethics will be a big part in all this. Companies will need to run their businesses more ethically and authentically, because Gen Yers are socially conscious. It’s affecting other Generations too - even oldies like me (I’m sorta in Gen X) are looking at the world in a new positive light.

If you’re fearful that Gen Y is a cop-out, don’t worry. Generation Y can get jobs in IBM.

Now, maybe I’ll use this excuse to get a Nintendo DS.

Some interesting facts from Wikipedia:

In their recent book, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa (2007) [22] found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US:

  • 97% own a computer
  • 94% own a cell phone
  • 76% use Instant Messaging.
  • 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
  • 34% use websites as their primary source of news
  • 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs
  • 49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
  • 75% of college students have a Facebook account [23]
  • 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.

More Career Advice: Don’t be popular

I don’t think popularity can be manufactured. There’s always some amount of human randomness that dares to defy the ‘obvious’, and in Murphy’s terms whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

So why bother being popular? It doesn’t get you anywhere. It only gets you along with other people very well. And unless that’s what you want, you really should ask yourself if it’s really worth the sacrifice.

Focus on knowing who you are instead. It’s much much healthier, has longer lasting benefits, and leaves a trail of positive influence.

Specifically, in order to build a successful career, you must focus on building and improving your strengths, NOT your weaknesses. Studies has shown that people fare better being average performers on their weaknesses, while excelling at their strengths.

There are ways to resolve weakness through collaboration, delegation, outsourcing, or creatively arriving at a solution. It’s what some people call adapting. But you can call it whatever you want.

The reason why following popular vote is detrimental to your career is because there are way too many signals and it can be too confusing. It’s more economical to focus on yourself and knowing who you are, and just living your life according to your needs and wants.

I would even encourage you to challenge the status quo and stand up for something you truly believe in, and are willing to take a stand for. It is enormously rewarding and seriously impacts your ability to navigate life for the longer term. It may not be so rewarding short term, but you don’t want to end up regretting something you wish you should have done over and over again.

References:

Doing something you’re not: Bad

I currently work in South East Asia, where the people around me are predominantly Asian. There’s a cultural stigma that seems to glorify traditional roles as they go - technicians, engineers, people managers, salespeople, big bosses. It helps to keep things simple and straightforward, but can get in the way of improvements, sometimes.

There aren’t many “custom” job roles, here. If any, they’re not the norm, and it would be difficult to find people with specialized skills - particularly because people don’t want to specialize.

Usability engineering is one such role. The demand for usability engineers in the country where I work is close to none. This is a stark comparison to the West. But my point isn’t about usability. It’s about its departure from “traditional” jobs such as software development or technical support, and that some jobs (and increasingly more jobs) are better suited for some people than others.

Being an INTP, my role as an engineer seems to fit like a glove. I’ve managed to bring benefit to the company by leveraging on my strengths. But I wonder how many people find themselves doing something that doesn’t quite match up.

Penelope Trunk thinks that it’s not about doing what you love, but doing what you are, that’s important. And she’s right - love can be temporary. It’s much better to do things that are a natural fit for you.

It doesn’t help that some jobs pay much more than others, either. Just because CEOs have high salaries doesn’t mean that I should strive to be one. There’s much more to a job than the salary, and I’m a firm believer that it would be increasingly difficult to advance if choices were made based on what jobs we wanted to climb up to, for money’s sake.

I do observe, however, that companies are more willing to explore new job roles these days, and are willing to allow employees to introduce improvements and ease into specializations that will benefit the company in the long run. This means that it’s possible for someone to carve out a niche role - and be rewarded for it.

This can especially happen to people who do a lot of pioneering work. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from taking the initiative to do something different and beneficial for the company - even if it’s potentially out of the job scope.

Specialization is a good thing to have these days.