The Future of the "Millennials" Workforce

Saw this article on CIO Magazine about the concerns companies should have about the future workforce, because as it states:

Chris Scalet first realized that the next generation of workers will require drastically different IT tools and policies when he recently watched his 20-year-old daughter studying for her college classes.

Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.

"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."

Scalet is among a growing number of IT executives who are in the early stages of planning on how to prepare their companies to adequately meet the needs of the 80 million children of baby boomers who are now or will soon enter the workforce.

All I can say is: Oh please, give me a break! I'm a Gen X'er and during the 80's and early 90's, I and my friends were doing the exact same kind of multi-tasking, short attention span activities, but instead of the internet and iPods, we were watching TV, listening to records/CDs (or the Sony "Walkman"), talking on the phone (this was when we used the old and reliable land lines), and doing homework and our parents complained we were doing too much and really not much of anything.

The only difference between now and then, is that the technology has become more ubiquitous, available, portable, and on-demand then my and previous generations and has made young people more distracted whether good or bad.

They quote internet guru and pundit Don Tapscott:

Businesses to create and manage what Tapscott describes as "the next-generation enterprise," they will have to find a way to adapt to new types of technologies that younger workers are increasingly demanding.

"If you have generation that is coming into the workforce that has grown up using new collaboration models, business ought to care," Tapscott said. "[The collaboration models] are going to dominate the 21st century marketplace. If you don't understand that, you're going to fail economically."

If anything, this will be great for consultants like Tapscott to sell their services on how to accommodate these rising workforce brats. A 60 Minute segment aired on November 11, 2007 on this very topic and "as correspondent Morley Safer reports, corporate America is so unnerved by all this that companies like Merrill Lynch, Ernst & Young, Disney and scores of others are hiring consultants to teach them how to deal with this generation that only takes 'yes' for an answer".

I think the notion of having to constantly accommodate a generation of workers just because they expect something is a bad thing, as the expectations if constantly met just because you ask or demand for them, sets a precedence wherein they are no longer looked upon as privileges and incentives, but rather as required accommodations that lose their original motivating factors.