Generation Y

I was in a recruitment drive trip to Australia recently to look at campus recruits - graduates who wants to return back to Malaysia to work. I learnt much about Generation Y during this trip.

Generation Y characteristics on job-hunting :
- Career not Employer - they care about themselves and their own career rather than look for employers and how they can contribute to the employer. They want to be trained for the job and asks and assess employers (not the employer assessing the employee) about the prospects of cool opportunities such as "management trainee" kind of positions where they can practice job rotation and learn before having to contribute

- Academic perfection - the short cut way. Those I met usually had brilliant SPM results, but varied performance in university. No doubt I only met a subset of students, but it seemed that the old fashion way of consistent hard work was out of the window, some students even told me they learned how to "do the exams to score" and was not shy about it

- Shopping for a job, not looking for a career. When I was younger (oh gosh, am I saying this?) - I used to look for a place to build a career - now graduates are shopping around for a job which suits them, offers them training and without any due concern about whether this was what they want to do for a career.

- Overseas the grass is greener - most graduates I met (not just Malaysians, but other nationalities) wants to have a job in Australia after they graduate. They did not think about opportunities or their own countries or even their own capabilities and grades suitability and difficulties in finding a job - the standard question was "are you hiring for australia?" and then when the answer was not affirmative, next statement was "i want to work in australia". Whilst I am not advocating the disadvantages of this, all I am asking generation y malaysians overseas to do is to examine what is best for themselves and look in the mirror and question why they should not serve their own country first (!!! there, another old person thought !!!)

- Whither the sportsman? Either we were looking at the wrong set of candidates or there was a severe lacking of balanced kids out there nowadays - where was the sportsman who is an all-rounder? where is the guy who says his hobbies are "badminton and running" or something achieved in those areas? Nowadays CVs are littered with random jobs which is more "money making" part time jobs to supplement income, and these jobs are used as a "experience profile" to support the candidate.

- Working hard is not an option. I used to think it was the ONLY option. I can photocopy, bind and print an entire proposal on my own in my office, despite my position. The gen y candidate complains about being asked as an intern to photocopy a few sheets.

So you guessed it, I am Gen X and still struggling with a plastic smile after 11 days of recruiting booth stand ins trying to handle Gen Y candidate's questions.

I think I need to go for a class to deal with Gen Y. Before Gen Z comes on board.