HOW TO GROW PERSONALLY
We need to find meaning in what we are doing. That means finding a match between your personality and the job you do — and that means knowing your own personality. It is interesting to see how many Generation Y students are adding sense and meaning to money as a work priority. They saw their parents working with complete loyalty and conviction, without question or criticism, risking their health, losing spouses, children and friends slowly over thirty-five years, only to find themselves sacked one grey Monday morning without any reasonable explanation.
So those young adults don’t share the same vision of their working life as their parents. Long years of effort in exchange for salary rises and slow promotions up the career ladder seem pointless to them. Generation Y wants to make things happen fast — as fast as they can search for information on Google — working independently, internationally and focusing on things that matter personally to them. Often that is translated into cool and interesting projects that range from spending a winter as a ski instructor to doing an internship with a favourite designer in London, or being a curator in a gallery, working as a social community manager or developing an ethical fashion brand.
This vision of life is just as important to Generation X, members of which were born in a manual age and later acquired digital skills — yes, that’s me! In a few years from now ‘the war for talent’3 will be a reality for everyone, even for the older baby boomers — that is, people who were born in the years following the Second World War.
‘For them’, and for other generations, too, everything — work and life included — is becoming more complex. The requirement for dealing with this complexity is the same for every generation: know yourself and match your personality with your job.
