What Are You Looking for in Your Dream Job?

"What are you looking for in your dream job?"

Baby Boomers and also known as our grandparents would answer "Job security". Generation X, also known as our parents would say "work-life balance". Now, our generation known as the Millennials or Generation Y have a completely different perspective. Most Millennials would answer "we want to work in a place with a purpose, we want to make an impact, we want free food and bean bag chairs" but to understand this better we have to discover more about this new generation, believed to become the most influential population in the workplace.

Millennials are the generation born between 1982 and sometime in the early 2000’s. Between this interval there is a big span of years and a big span of different people born in different countries and cultures. Characterizing them is hard since we are aggregating too many people into just one big group called the Millennials, but according to Time Magazine “Each country's millennials are different, but because of globalization, social media, the exporting of Western culture and the speed of change, millennials worldwide are more similar to one another than to older generations within their nations”.

Millennials have been characterized in many different ways, both with negative and positive aspects. The Gen X, also known as the “me generation”, gave birth to the “me me me generation”, well known as the Millennials, whose self-centered technology has only confirmed this. Many describe them as lazy, narcissistic and prone to jump job to job and others considered them as being more open-minded and more supportive of equal rights for minorities, more creative and more motivated.

Millennials grew up in an electronic-filled and increasingly online and socially-networked world. Also, they are the generation that has received the most marketing attention. In fact, technological environment in which they grew up influences their thoughts and values, and also reflects them. Through the following social networks and other electronic elements, some personality traits of this generation stand out.

(Instagram)

We have an entire generation with a high sense of impatience.  Most of this generation has grown up not having to wait for anything and living with a need of constant gratitude. “The need for instant gratification is not new, but our expectation of ‘instant’ has become faster, and as a result, our patience is thinner”, said Narayan Janakiraman, an assistant marketing professor at the University of Texas, Arlington. If you want to buy something, you go to Amazon and it arrives at your house the next day. If you want to watch a movie, you don’t have to check the movie times anymore or wait for a download, with Netflix you can watch whatever and whenever you want instantly. So how can this affect how this generation works? It is simple: a 2012 survey of 1,291 US workers from CareerBuilder and Inavero revealed that the average length of time a Millennial remains in a job is three years. One of the primary reasons Millennials are more likely to change jobs is because they are not willing to stick around if they do not believe they are making an impact, so they get impatient and just quit. They want to achieve the highest point of the mountain faster than it takes to climb it.

Snapchat is associated to the beginning of the so much known “Selfie” – considered the word of the year in 2013 by the Oxford English Dictionary. Although all the positive and funny aspects that the selfie represents nowadays, this new concept sometimes brings with it some negative values and attitudes: the idea of “Me” being the spotlight leads to a need of exhibition and self-centeredness that sometimes can be dangerous. Moreover, since it is instantaneous it can result as a dependence and willingness to constantly receive news and photos of the others´ life. The problem is that there is a constant need of keeping these others updated on my life and being updated on theirs as well. By doing this, Millennials are believed to be the most ambitious and self-centered generation in a way that they stick with only doing their job well, trying to figure out the best and fastest way to complete their tasks. They don’t want to go ahead of their job if they are not rewarded for that, they want to complete successfully what they were asked to do and then simply enjoy life. Due to this constant need of being informed, Millennials are considered to perform better if they know the exact propose of what they are doing. Transparency at the work place is essential and the “just do it” idea isn’t enough.

Besides that, Millennials want to be heard, they want their opinion to be valued by others. We know when you get the attention it feels good; and for millennials to get some of that attention is through a global success social network called Twitter. Through this app, they expose their opinion. They write what they think, how they feel and what they are doing, with the aim of getting feedback: "retweet" from their followers or just likes and comments to their tweets. They feel important when this happens; they feel that their opinions are taken into consideration by others and that they can make a difference through what they say. These users do not only want to keep up with the conversation, they want to get involved with it, too. Regarding leadership, since they aspire to be the best at what they do and since they believe that being a good listener is an important trait in a leader, they find in Twitter a way of being heard and hear others.

Facebook also emphasizes the way this generation relates with their superiors. According to Forbes magazine, “millennials think that employee/employer relationships must extend beyond just the formal annual work review”. They need constant feedback about their performance. They are used to be asked “What´s on your mind?” once they check their Facebook feed. For that reason, they don’t want bosses which are supervisors or streaked.  They want mentors: “They don’t want to work for you, they want to work with you”, as Simon Sinek, an “expert” in this matter, once said. It’s important to stress that being close to their superiors doesn’t mean that they don’t want to impress them! On the contrary, they not only want constant positive feedback, but also want to be challenged. Millennials hate boring tasks, they want tough projects.

In terms of relationships within the work environment, they look for good relations with their colleagues; in fact, they want to make “friends” with everyone. Networking is considered to be an added value for their Curriculum and so it´s something they seek for in every single “professional” experience they take. Facebook exemplifies their need to make “friends” with everyone and to stay connected at least virtually: according to statistics, Millennials have on average more friends on Facebook than other generations combined. Can Millennials be that special to have more than 1000 real and intimate friends just because it appears on their Facebook profile?