Generation Y: Coming at you full (work)force!

“You look WAY too young to be a supervisor!”

This is how my meeting with the middle-aged auditor from Washington D.C. started out yesterday.  Had I been closer to his age, I may have taken it as a compliment.  But being a person who straddles the Generation X/Generation Y line, I took major offense.  His comment made me feel we should have ended the meeting right then because what credibility did I have, being a silly youngster and all?  He probably thought I was going to pull out my cell phone to text message my girlfriends with something like, “OMG this geezer just talked to me! LOL!”

Fast forward to today, a.k.a. the antithesis of yesterday.  I’m in a workshop on Social Media hosted by the Whatcom Volunteer Center, attended by young non-profit professionals, taught by college students. When we introduced ourselves, nobody made a face when I said my name and position. Nobody asked me for my age or credentials. Nobody questioned my ability to do my job. In fact, today’s workshop solidified for me the importance of having young people in the workplace.

Check out this awesome presentation on the future of communication called “Social Media Revolution” by Socialnomics.

With the onset of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, the ways we communicate and do business are changing. We need the younger generations who grew up with this world to be our ambassadors into the future.  Isn’t it strange to think that there are people walking around today who will never know what life was like BEFORE the Internet? Isn’t it strange to think that these Generation Y folks have a brand new way of communicating with their world? This is where life is headed folks, and we can’t stop it. So let’s embrace it, shall we?

According to this interview with Don Tapscott, professor, and chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network, and bestselling author of the book Grown Up Digital, teenagers who have grown up in the Internet age actually have a completely different brain than Baby Boomers: “Boomers have watched TV for 24 hours a week and…these kids have spent that amount of time interacting, collaborating, composing their thoughts, scrutinizing, authenticating, organizing information, having to remember things. And this creates multitasking, and this creates a different kind of brain. So the actual deep structure and synaptic connections in the brain are different for an entire generation.” Tapscott believes that this way of thinking will enable the next generation to transform society for the better.

Transform society for the better in 140 characters or less?  WHOA!  Where do I sign up? 

Since I started my job as Volunteer Program Manager in September, I’ve already experienced the power of social networking.  The staff here have made it part of their job descriptions to blog, tweet, and maintain our Facebook group and fan pages.  I feel so much more connected to other non-profits, AmeriCorps teams, staff, volunteers, and individuals who are just interested in our mission purely from spending a few minutes a day checking our Twitter account.  In fact, I found out about today’s workshop from Twitter!

So let’s go back to my Baby Boomer friend from D.C., and play a little bit of “What I Should Have Said” Theatre. 

Him: “You look WAY too young to be a supervisor!”

Me:  “You look WAY too old to understand the future.”