Good and bad news from the Millenial Generation

temperase.jpgFirst the bad (?) news:
They don’t’ understand copyright laws (but “who does?”, the article fairly asks)

While they were generally concerned with staying on the “good side” of the law, they were “making up rules themselves” about what and how to use intellectual property. They also did not understand their own rights as creators of content.
One student said that uploading network programming was fair use because she was “merely showing others in a virtual ‘water cooler’ environment what she was talking about and had found interesting.”

And from another front in this excellent article

At 11 years old, Kate Achille had a pager for her parents to reach her when necessary. At 13, she had a cell phone. Now 22 and working for a school, she e-mails her mother as many as five times a day and calls her on the cell phone several times a week.

To prepare for millennials, it’s important to understand how cell phones and computers have changed their brain development, the enormous role their parents play in their lives well into adulthood, and what policies and training programs HR professionals will need to implement to transition these young people into the workplace.

Noticed the “computers have changed their brain development” part?! Easy to forget, but true

…technology allows a perpetual connection to peers, leaving little time for autonomy. “Except for their mothers, these kids don’t have relationships with people outside of their generation.

That’s definitely bad news. I am sure that being most of the time surrounded by older peers and wanting to learn from them, dulled me up a little, and perhaps made me grow a bit too fast. I still have the feeling that I didn’t have time to “enjoy my youth”. However, the lessons learned from these older peers where highly valuable and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. Things like “don’t try to run before you walk”, “one after another (so I wouldn’t get nervous when I had too many things to do)” and others still resonate with me every day. I’ll be forever thankful to the people who said that to me, even if at that time it may not have made so much sense.
My father was also 47 years older than me, so he wasn’t the kind of father who would “play football” with me. However, I am sure what he gave me in wisdom more than made up for it and I don’t feel I missed anything.

…millennials’ brains are still developing reasoning, planning and decision-making capabilities while they are depending heavily on technology—cell phones, IM and e-mail—as well as parents and friends at the other end of the technology. As a result, some experts believe millennials struggle to make decisions independently.

Alas! I thought I was the only one who noticed this. Now someone else knows! It is clear to me that the younger generations have these problems, and I have writen extensively about it in my blog. The most striking way of seeing this, as in my experience, is trying o hire these folks and thinking in the interview “my god, if I hire you, I would have one more problem to take care of”. This is very serious stuff. The world needs people more able to work in a variety of ways to take decisions and make sense of the information around us, not only to find that information (computers can do that quite well, thank you). If new generations can’t do this, what can they do?
And then come the “good” news… “they are techno savvy”, “adept at global diversity issues”, “team oriented” and “multitaskers”.
Parents of these peope will have to excuse me for being so hard on the younger generations in my blog posts….but I would ask them to think really hard on what they’re doing. Overprotecting their children is making them weaker for a hostile future when they -parents- won’t be there anymore. This generation will have to battle face to face with offshore outsourcing, automated system and robots. The last thing these kids need is overprotection.

…small errors induce critical thinking,” and if children are not allowed to make small errors, they don’t learn through experience

I made and still make lots of errors every day. “Thanks” to my parents for that…

April 25, 2007 · Filed Under Future, Youth

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