Contact CU Independent News Staff Writer Sarah Farley at Sarah.Farley@colorado.edu.
As of 2015, millennials are the largest age demographic in the workforce. Speaking to the open topic of “Millennials in the Workplace,” Peter Rupert Lighte, Cynthia Koenig, Sam Cook and B.J. Whetstine could only speak from experience, each having worked with members of the millennial generation, some being borderline members themselves.
Risk aversion was a commonly agreed upon characteristic that each panelist observed in millennial workers in their careers. Lighte, the oldest panelist, with a career in banking, took a stab at hipsters, who he views as the culmination of a generation, saying, “Hipsters are cursed and mistake social media as adventure.”
The predominantly older crowd in attendance got a kick out of this assertion. Lighte expressed dismay with this generation’s inability to be “swept away” by adventure, and how its members instead opt for a specific life path.
For the most part, though, the panelists shined a positive light on the millennial generation, touting their excellence at pragmatic problem solving. Whetstine, a Peace Corps coordinator, opened his talk with “Millennials are awesome, and they will save us all.”
In terms of how, he touted his generation’s pragmatic problem-solving skills and intolerance for nonsense. Koenig, CEO of Wello, and Cook, founder of Button Poetry, agreed with Whetstine’s observation that millennials work by pin-pointing exactly what they must do to succeed, and then leveraging all of their available resources to achieve their goal.
A trend came up that older generations might not realize: millennials don’t just want any job with the only goal being to make money. Instead they desire to do something important, to make a meaningful contribution with their lives. This mindset could contribute to the generation’s unwillingness to do menial tasks, which the panelists bemoaned, but admitted that millennials will tackle the hard, complicated assignments with vigor and victory.
Millennials are actively reshaping the workplace toward a more democratized form.
Cook spoke to this observation, saying, “co-creation is one of the most important words for this generation.”
Within his experience, he found millennials sharing their efforts instead of working alone, which generates a more collectively made product. This is definitely something traditional work spaces will have to adjust to in order to fit the ideology of the newly dominate labor pool.
Overall, the panelists agreed that there are always negative pitfalls to each generation, but the millennial generation has one powerful factor: definite optimism. Despite the horrors occurring every day, this generation manages to keep pushing forward and to find the light in the darkness. And this is why they, as Whetstine pointed out, will be the ones to save us all.
