The Lattice Group Voice
Featured Guest Blogger May 8th, 2008
We agree with Judi Casey in her recent blog “Getting Gen Y to talk about work and family issues.” Young people are surprisingly poorly prepared for dealing with “real” life - with balancing work and family issues, that is. We created The Lattice Group in the summer of 2007, after we graduated from college and realized that we hadn’t thought about these issues either.
Our work with The Lattice Group has taken us to New York, Madrid and Paris and now to Stockholm. Next week we leave for Moscow. In each country we are interviewing college students and young professionals to learn what their hopes, expectations and fears are for the future. Though we have found that attitudes differ greatly between nations—the USA being the most traditional to date by far— there is one generalization that we can make: young people love to talk about these issues! In Madrid, our interviews sometimes ran over into whole evenings of conversation (though this may just be because Spaniards are so darned social). Even in New York, the city where no one seems to have time for sleep, let alone talking to perfect strangers about work-life balance, the conversations were extremely well received. Young people, our fellow Gen Y’ers, are desperate to talk partly because they appear never, or rarely, to have done so before.
Our close to 90 interviews thus far have shown us that young people are craving more resources and guidance before they are mid-stride in their careers. We recommend that action be taken at college. For example, Career Services could be aimed at more than job-placement; they could give increased attention to discussions about the early career challenges. Why not emulate Williams College that teaches “Composing a Life: Finding Success and Balance in Life after Williams?” Encourage young people to articulate what kind of life, both professionally and personally, they want in the long run, not just tomorrow, or next year.
Tools are needed so that they can plan accordingly, and the most important tool is information. After all, you must know what your options are in order to make good decisions. Organizations like the Sloan Network are making incredibly important information available. Perhaps it is time to disseminate the information to college students. If you are an academic or researcher working on these topics and would like to get your voice heard among Gen Y, we invite guest bloggers on The Lattice Group website.
