2025: A Bleak Outlook

I know. I know. It's almost 2015, we're 10 years away from the 2025 "BOOM". But I feel the need to discuss it. 

There are a lot of preconceived notions of what it takes to train and teach a millennial. "They are a hard beast to tame." Or to quote Entrepreneur "Myth: Millennials can't tear themselves away from their smartphones or Facebook long enough to hold a conversation with clients or co-workers." orrrrr "They have the attention span of gnats." 

There has been research done (The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking - Here on Amazon.com) that points to the fact that the brain of the Millennials [digital natives] has and is still altering or as the author [Marc Prensky pg 12] describes it: Neuroplacticity - "stimulation of various kinds actually changes the brain structures and affects the way people think... the brain constantly reorganizes itself all of our child and adult lives." A major differentiation between the boomer generation and the millennial, is the use of technology that rapidly changes, causes adaptation, causes the brain to constantly be changing.  Prensky's article then goes into discussing that the attention span of the digital natives is there, but its more that we choose to pay attention or not; we learn in bursts, but our short comings are that we don't take the time to fully process the information that we have learned. 

Then there is THIS article: MIT Researcher’s New Warning: At Today’s Rate, Half Of All U.S. Children Will Be Autistic By 2025

75% of the workforce will consist of millennials by 2025... 

50% of the population will have Autism by 2025...

Does this mean that 1/3 of the workforce will have autism?  (I'm terrible at math.) 

If we can't adapt and figure out how to hire, manage, and retain millennials now, if Dr. Seneff's research proves to be right, how are we going to be hire, manage, and retain millennials that are on the autistic spectrum? I know this is probably a far reach connecting these two dots, but 2025 isn't looking all that awesome. 

Generation Gap Explained

Patience?

Building Tangent: Woolworth Building

Googling "Building Tours" tonight, looking for a building that would be interesting for the Emerging Leaders & Young Professionals committee, I came across the Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world...

" On the night of April 24, 1913, the Woolworth Building illuminated the New York night as 80,000 incandescent bulbs throughout the tower flashed on, activated when President Woodrow Wilson flipped a ceremonial switch in Washington, D.C. The brilliant spectacle was a career-crowning achievement for the tower’s owner, the five-and-dime store king Frank W. Woolworth, who paid for the skyscraper with his personal fortune and took a hands-on role in every decision of its design. " http://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/WOOLWORTH/WWat100PR.pdf (Skyscraper Museum Press Release)

Two things struck me from the press release:

80,000 incandescent bulbs throughout the tower flashed on, activated when President Woodrow Wilson flipped a ceremonial switch in Washington, D.C

1. 80k incandescent bulbs... WTF, can you imagine how much electricity that building consumes? Can you imagine if the building ever decided to go under a renovation that would change the over to LED's? I can't even imagine!!!
2. President Woodrow Wilson flipped a ceremonial switch in Washington D.C..... I really REALLLLLY want to know more about this. Why?? How?? 

Interesting article related article:

http://tribecacitizen.com/2013/03/04/what-i-learned-about-the-woolworth-building/

Workplace Training for working with Millennials

On my meandering through the interwebs, I found this great video and perhaps a stereotypical way that millennials are looked at. Does it ring true?? Not of the millennials I know. 

Interesting Re-Read of the Day

See... still so much information gathering going on in my little brain. 

http://www.workforce.com/articles/21004-millennial-in-training 

This needs some re-writing to be applicable. #edited ***

ORIGINAL: 

"Yet some companies are unprepared to deal with this rapidly unfolding generational shift in leadership. It’s all too easy to believe that current approaches for developing leaders will work for millennials — they won’t. A focus on leadership development as usual will leave you vulnerable to losing the best and brightest of your youthful workforce. You can embrace the challenge of doing what it really takes to develop millennial leaders or watch them walk out the door to head up a competitor’s operation."

MY VERSION: 

Most in the facility management industry are unprepared to deal with the rapidly unfolding generational shift. It’s all too easy to believe that current approaches for developing facility managers will work for millennials — they won’t. A focus on developed management, honed through years of experience, will leave the industry vulnerable to losing the best and brightest of the youthful workforce. The facility management industry MUST embrace the challenge of doing what it really takes to develop millennial facility managers or watch them walk out the door to another industry.

The article goes on to touch on: 

- adaptation of technology

- peer vs professional (need to go revisit this subject in another post)

- change management

- digital natives

- fluidity & collaboration

- soft management skills (see peer vs professional)

- "helping them, helps us"


***Just to be clear, I won't be using that paragraph in my thesis, but this is more a look into how I read an article and that information translates in my brain. Everything that I seem to pick up and read regarding millennials can all be translated into how it relates specifically to facility management. #truth

What my thesis does and it doesn't.

I don’t argue that technology stimulates or attracts millennials to the industry, but I address how technology would keep them or does keep them in the FM world. Older generations previously steered clear of technology for various reasons; one of them is the training of technology is very involved and evolves at a fast pace; being so hands on with managing facilities, older generations didn’t take the time to invest in technology like IWMS, BIM, etc, mostly because they didn't have the time! There are theories that Facility Managers are silo'd so they didn't want to ask for help or admit that they needed the help that technology. A debate...

Other industries have or did embraced technology before FM, as a result FM has had no choice but to adapt and we’re playing catch up. When you’re talking about BIM for example our relationship with architecture has fueled the drive for FMs to adapt; ex: architecture develops technology to make their lives easier, specifically in context of a client (if you can show them exactly what their facility is going to look like, they will be oohhh'd and ahhhh’d, and have buy in). FM needs info from architects to run facilities effectively and this information comes digitally, only works in specific software, formats, etc etc. Previously FM’s would harvest the information themselves, sometimes ad hoc (staying silo’d). Technology breeds collaboration and transparency, something FM is becoming better at. 

I do touch on “gamification” of the industry in the context of teaching and training millennials, even though I hate that word and use a different phrase. I try and compare 'gamification' to previous methods of learning which was/is long, hands on training sessions in a classroom setting; my generation isn't anywhere near that anymore, we fall asleep.

Wait, what? You're still writing...

Yes, that's WRITE, I'm still righting...

I was a terrible student and did not complete my thesis. Part of it was fear, part of it was laziness, part of it was overload.

Fear: Fear of finishing my research that has me wrapped up in another world of FM that I need to navigate professionally. Fear that my 4 years of my masters track education was over. Fear of having to actually move on to a life without night classes, where I'd have to come home after work all the time! Things I haven't had in years... (9 of them?)

Laziness: Truth be told, I could have put a lot more effort into my thesis. The things that I have pulled out of my research can be stand alone articles, journals, and white papers in the industry. This might go back to fear; but I did NOT focus on this thesis at all, unlike my other one. Hopefully I can get my shit together on this go round.

Overload: Do you know how much information there is out there about inclusion? A LOT. There's even more about the changing of the guard - the whole Millennials taking over the world subject matter. Every time I would write a sentence I feel like more information would come out that would help that sentence. BLAH. Have to learn how to put up that wall when it comes to information. Also!!!! I went through a lot of changes, specifically with my career and professional involvement.

I also think that my lack of contributing to this blog led to my lack of drive to finish my thesis... so here we are and I'm restarting!!!!

<3HF