I think money is becoming less of a motivating factor for generation Y. More and more young people no longer want a fancy car, a nice house at 23, or to get married and have kids at 25. They want freedom, vacation time, cool work environments and variety.
Interestingly enough, I think a lot of the trades offer what my generation is looking for, but lacks the skills to do so. We're also branded by many blue-collar tradesman as being "stupid college kids."
This is what Beer Baron was hinting at.
PHeller wrote: I think money is becoming less of a motivating factor for generation Y. More and more young people no longer want a fancy car, a nice house at 23, or to get married and have kids at 25. They want freedom, vacation time, cool work environments and variety.
So... less materialistic? I'm not sure this is a bad thing... 
Well many in Generation X believe you SHOULD want the nicest car, biggest house, a family and as much money as you can get your hands on.
I've talked to many older folks who do not understand why I would want to take a pay cut to work 30 hours a week. They ask "what would do with that extra 10 hours?" and I reply "learn to weld?"
Our current corporate culture is built around 40 hour weeks, 2 weeks vacation, etc.
In reply to Ian F:
It isn't a bad thing, per se, in theory it's actually a great thing. But it leads to a workforce that lacks strong financial obligation to sticking with a situation they're not happy with. I think it also causes managers that are more old-school in their thinking to see younger workers as flight risks. Because if the kid isn't working on getting some babies and a yard for them to play in, why stick around through thick and thin?
PHeller wrote: I think money is becoming less of a motivating factor for generation Y. More and more young people no longer want a fancy car, a nice house at 23, or to get married and have kids at 25. They want freedom, vacation time, cool work environments and variety. Interestingly enough, I think a lot of the trades offer what my generation is looking for, but lacks the skills to do so. We're also branded by many blue-collar tradesman as being "stupid college kids." This is what Beer Baron was hinting at.
Not exactly. I suspect more of us view work as just a means to pursue our true interests, but it's not just about "cool work environments". It's work as a means to an end. We are fine with the work being crummy and dirty, as long as it gives us the resources (time, energy, and money) to pursue the few things we care most about.
When I say "freedom" and "time". I mean we want to be able to work a shift schedule that doesn't kill us. We want to be able to go grab a beer with friends in the evenings and get together on Saturday. To have enough vacation days to take the occasional long weekend.
We want a middle class-lifestyle. We are more than happy to work hard, dirty labor to do it. We do not believe that fast food or retail sales are opportunities that will carry us far in life.
I'd like to put up a quote that Mike Rowe said in Part I of this post:
Mike Rowe said: The current skills gap has unfolded in part because vocational education vanished from high schools. I'm all for reinstating those programs, but I'm afraid that won't be enough. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs available right now that people simply do not want. This is not because the jobs are "bad," or the pay is lousy. It's because we've raised an entire generation to view these opportunities as subordinate to a four-year degree. Good jobs are going begging because hard work and skilled labor are no longer valued in the same way as they were 50 years ago.
I 100% agree with this. I went to college because I wanted to be an engineer. I got a degree in a marketable field. But I knew a lot of classmates who majored in something less-marketable (or in a field that was saturated) who left college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and no job prospects. Even worse, most of those kids went to college just because mommy and daddy told them to.
We need to stop encouraging every child to go to college. It is not for everyone. If fewer kids go to college, we would solve the lack of skilled labor problem and create less of a demand for higher education, which would bring down its price for those who should go to college.
As for my fellow late-20/early-30-somethinges saying that Gen-X/Y is not that bad: look around you. Those of us who are hard-working are the exceptions, not the rules. Most people our age think everything should be handed to them.
In reply to Beer Baron:
Maybe Generation Y wants less cookie cutter corporate ideas of benefits and more flexibility.
When I was hired they asked me if my compensation was enough. I asked if I was able to buy vacation or trade salary for vacation. They have no structure to do so.
The big problem is getting training to be able to do a job. Companies do not seem to want to make the investment in new employees to train them up. Being smart, capable, and hard working isn't enough. You need job experience (which you can't get before the job) or you need education in the very very specific field you are hunting for a job in.
This goes to the "having the opportunity to try and discover it is a good fit or not". It is now on new people entering to work force to get pre-trained for a job. My generation went to college to get a well-rounded skill set that would be reasonably applicable to a lot of jobs (because we were told that is what the work force needed). That isn't good enough. You need the specific degree/certification for a particular job and it is not very transferable to other jobs. You also need to devote 1-2 years of your life to study it, pay for it yourself, and gamble that there will even be demand when you're done. Then you get to try it and see if it is a decent fit for you.
In reply to Beer Baron:
That's another issue that I don't think is getting enough attention by older people. I work at a company that, at one point in the past, you could walk in with a partially completed degree and be an electrical or mechanical engineer. If you had time in the military and worked on something similar, the company would hire people on condition that they'd start going to college. Start. They'd then drop out. These guys are thinning out, they've got 25+ years in with this same company and it worked for them.
The guy who started this company had a 5th grade education. That was a long long time ago but it really shows how times have changed. He built airplanes. Seen any 5th grade educated flight control engineers running around lately?
Agreed on the training thing. I regularly peruse job openings to see if there's something better out there. I have ~10 years of experience in my field. Just about every job opening I see is either entry level (read: not enough money) or requires a very, VERY specific skillset. And training is not an option.
On a whim, I applied for a job that I believed I was qualified for. The recruiter called me up, asked me a question, and then proceeded to yell at me for wasting his time because I wasn't qualified.
Really?
In reply to Sky_Render:
Oh yeah, that's always a riot. I had a 3rd party recruiter once call me about a job that was described with a number of acronyms that he didn't know how to pronounce per industry standards. I explained how to say them and what they meant or why they were important. He thanked me. At the end he told me I wasn't experienced enough for the job.
I view 3rd party recruiters as vultures and parasites unless they prove themselves otherwise.
Yeah, I now ignore all emails and phone calls from 3rd-party recruiters. That guy was too stupid to realize his job description was a little vague. I also just don't like being "recruited" by people who don't even understand what I do for a living, but that's another topic.
I know the situation my fiancee faced leaving college is totally different from mine. She is 8 years older than me. She got a degree in economics, went to a temp agency, and one of her first jobs landed her as a computer programmer. She had never programmed before, but they trained her on the job. In my generation, this would be virtually unheard of.
The trouble is, the economy went to E36 M3. All the jobs the people coming in to the market were told would be there disappeared, plus a bunch of people with experience got laid off. There became a glut of highly qualified people on the market desperate for a decent job. Companies learned they can be hyper-selective with absurd minimum qualifications for the position ("Entry-Level Position: 3-5 years experience or 1 year+ with 4-year degree and specific certification required." <-not a joke), then pay crap and abuse the new employee because there are 10 other people begging for the same position.
Beer Baron wrote: The trouble is, the economy went to E36 M3. All the jobs the people coming in to the market were told would be there disappeared, plus a bunch of people with experience got laid off. There became a glut of highly qualified people on the market *desperate* for a decent job. Companies learned they can be hyper-selective with absurd minimum qualifications for the position ("Entry-Level Position: 3-5 years experience or 1 year+ with 4-year degree and specific certification required."), then pay crap and abuse the new employee because there are 10 other people begging for the same position.
Yes, absolutely. So we're stuck in jobs making significantly less than other people (often doing the exact same job), yet we can't apply for more lucrative jobs because we don't meet the insanely-stringent requirements. The only jobs we can apply for are entry-level and would require us to take a pay cut!
Employers have us over a barrel, and they know it.
The biggest thing that my generation does not seem to want to compromise on isn't so much doing hard, dirty work, but not wanting to relocate across the country or to someplace isolated. Especially not if it is for a type of work they have not done before.
Sky_Render wrote: Employers have us over a barrel, and they know it.
Exactly. And then we get to deal with the insult of being told this is because we are "lazy" on top of the injury to how difficult it is to launch a career right now.
Beer Baron wrote: The biggest thing that my generation does not seem to want to compromise on isn't so much doing hard, dirty work, but not wanting to relocate across the country or to someplace isolated. Especially not if it is for a type of work they have not done before.
Oh come on, N. Dakota and the lucrative field of fracking are dream jobs! Who wouldn't want to shotgun their entire life to get up there and frack stuff up?!
Sheesh, kids these days...
Beer Baron wrote:Sky_Render wrote: Employers have us over a barrel, and they know it.Exactly. And then we get to deal with the insult of being told this is because we are "lazy" on top of the injury to how difficult it is to launch a career right now.
We should unionize!
Beer Baron wrote: The biggest thing that my generation does not seem to want to compromise on isn't so much doing hard, dirty work, but not wanting to relocate across the country or to someplace isolated. Especially not if it is for a type of work they have not done before.
Don't get me started. I saw a company (who shall remain nameless) looking for ANY engineer. They had great benefits. They would train you. They had competitive pay. They would even pay to move you out to their office...
...In the middle of B.F., Nowhere. Seriously, if you have a company that is looking for technical people and you're having trouble getting them, maybe you should start up a new office in a more appealing area of the country!
A quick look at some of your occupations...
...Engineer, Journalist, 4 year degree, County Planner, Electrical Designer, Architect, Production Control Analyst, CAD Specialist, Web Developer, IT guy...
With all due respect, guys, I don't think you represent the demographic Mr. Rowe is advocating.
The complaints in this thread looking for "flexibility", "freedom", "vacation time", "cool work environments", "40 hour work weeks (or less)" are EXACTLY what he is opposed to.
Hard work in the manual trades OFTEN means long hours, and it is unlikely you will ever have a flex schedule. You work when there is work. You work when the crew works. You work round the clock when there is something dirty to do. You work when the weather allows.
The ENTIRE POINT is that there are opportunities in these types of trades, and too few people willing to do them in the manner and terms that the jobs require.
I've worked in manual trades my entire life. I don't know anyone who has never worked an 80 hour week, never worked on weekends, never worked without overtime pay or vacation time, never worked without stopping for breaks or meals, never bled on the job.
Power outage? Linemen work round the clock in the rain. Manufacturing deadline? Machinists put in long days. Stopped up sewer? The Roto Rooter guy doesn't get to take off Christmas day. Concrete not curing? Finishers work all night long under truck headlights.
In reply to SVreX:
Oh, we understand that. At least I do. But that's not going to stop me from a good rant about the job prospects for younger professionals! 
Actually, I completely agree with you.
A lot of tradesmen get time off, it's just called "down time" in between busy seasons.
Beer Baron wrote: The biggest thing that my generation does not seem to want to compromise on isn't so much doing hard, dirty work, but not wanting to relocate across the country or to someplace isolated. Especially not if it is for a type of work they have not done before.
I don't get it.
The most connected generation in the history of the world can't work in a remote place that has the internet in trade for a 6 figure job that only works 6-8 months of the year?
I'd go to ND in a heartbeat.
It sounds like you are saying you'd like the hard, dirty work to come to you.
PHeller wrote: A lot of tradesmen get time off, it's just called "down time" in between busy seasons.
Which is when we work the hardest trying to find the next few jobs.
It's not for everyone.
PHeller wrote: A lot of tradesmen get time off, it's just called "down time" in between busy seasons.
Yeah, it's called getting "laid off". You work hard in the summer, then you live off your savings for the winter and hope there's something for you in the spring. It's not quite as easy or idyllic as it sounds.
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