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Read More »Your life is expensive: clothes, cell phone bills, iInternet service, cable TV, dining out, movies, concert tickets and nightclubs (with cover charges and high-priced drinks). How are you possibly going to afford all this on an entry-level salary? Maybe you need to change the people you hang out with.
The 40 million people in Generation Y (those born 1980 to 2000) have a combined disposable income of $200 billion. That's enough to make any product marketer salivate. The rest of the world pays close attention to the products you choose because you not only influence each other, but studies have found that your preferences shape your parent's purchasing decisions on everything from groceries to big-ticket items.- Let’s talk: Comment (2) | Blog
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I have a 21-year old personal trainer, Scott, whom I've been working with for about two years. He is a good trainer who knows his stuff. But frankly, that's not why I see him two to three times a week. I use him because he is a natural marketer who happens to be marketing himself.
At a birthday dinner last week with Scott and a group of his clients, talk turned to how all of us, well into our 30s and 40s and established in our careers, could learn a lot about career management by watching our young trainer. And it has nothing to do with his use of technology or some of the other ways we think young people are succeeding today. It’s pure old-fashioned business smarts.
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I was sitting in the middle seat on my flight this week, with a twenty-something girl sitting near the window. The flight attendant came by and asked what she wanted to drink. Here's how the dialogue went: Flight Attendant: … Read More »
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A few years ago the phrase "war for talent" was all the rage in discussions of hiring trends. The thinking was that as aging boomers started to move out of the workforce, there would be a fight to capture the young people rushing in to take their places.
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Consultants gave advice about how to court younger workers who craved different things than their boomer predecessors, and authors and bloggers wrote volumes about demystifying this new breed of worker. (Here’s a post I wrote about this for the New York Times back in 2007.)
Then the economy fell apart and talk of firing replaced talk of hiring. But it's possible that all that talent war talk is coming back. Read More »- Let’s talk: Comment (31) | Blog
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We’ve all heard the stories of those whose imprudent online postings (usually involving some choice words about an employer or a poor choice of photos of themselves) cost them a job. In the past few weeks it happened to a New York City government staffer, who resigned after posting her views about the President (whom she dubbed “O-dumb-a”) and his handling of the brouhaha over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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These are gaffes, and the people who made them should know better.
But lately I’ve been pondering the opposite situation. In this era of online engagement and revelation, can it ever be a problem to reveal too little or to have no online persona at all?
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A recent article from Psychology Today contend that Millennials (individuals born roughly from the early 1980s through the late 1990s, also known as Generation Y) are poised to take over the workplace.
The article declares that these newest entrants to the workforce were "raised by parents who often acted more like friends and mentors. So Gen Y comes to the negotiating table with unprecedented confidence about what kind of workplace they want.”
When I read articles like this, I’m of two minds. On on hand, I’m endlessly fascinated with the different generational characteristics that researchers have discovered between Generation X, Generation Y and Baby Boomers. On the other hand, descriptions about the characteristics of these generations often sound like they’ve come out of a fortune cookie or horoscope. Take this quote from that Psychology Today article: Read More »- Let’s talk: Comment (44) | Blog
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Pick up any newspaper on your way to work in the morning, and chances are, you'll see another financial giant brought low in the current unstable economy. Everyone in nonprofits and philanthropy is wondering what the financial sector meltdown means for us. Not only are the for-profit folks worried about their profits and their jobs, us nonprofit workers are worried about our donations and our jobs, too. Of course, no one can know for sure what the outcome of all this will be. The landscape changes day by day, and we could be in a very different place three months from now than we are today. But one thing IS clear. Things in the game done changed. Read More »
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