That One Time Someone Told Me Millennials Were Unemployable And I Replied With What I Should Have Written On My Resume
Guy on My Facebook Group: Let me tell you something about millennials… I know this is a wide net to cast, but still… most of that generation is unemployable. I’m a hiring manager for a top national corporation, and, no less, 14 of 15 applicants are unemployable for anything other than jockeying a register for minimum wage. It saddens me, deeply
Me: a. Millennials are the people from 1980-2006, that makes the oldest 37 and the youngest 11.
b. Incredibly frail emotionally and in their self-view doesn’t happen as a result of being coddled (most of the time). It happens as a result of being abused. Millennials are the least likely of any generation to mislabel abuse as “tough love” and the most likely to acknowledge how crappy the way they’ve been treated makes them feel.
You may see the symptom but it would be hubris to assume you know the cause. Calling it “coddling” without actually asking any of the people you’re judging how they’ve lived is jumping to conclusions.
c. I’d argue that the “inability to communicate their thoughts or articulate ideas” or to do “basic mental tasks, like basic math without a calculator” is less a sign that Millennials are dumbasses (and, if they are, it’s the older generation’s fault for being incapable of educating them in a way that makes them learn instead of want to commit suicide). Instead, I’d say that they are unable to communicate their thoughts or articulate ideas in a way that makes sense to many members of the older generation.
There hasn’t been a sudden drop in IQ. If anything, study after study proves that people are getting smarter. Millenials are the most educated group of people the world has ever known. EVER.
But the prevalence of the Internet and the ways schools work has shifted the way this intelligence is manifested. Today’s young people may be crap at mental math, but who needs to be good at it when there are calculators on phones, laptops, watches and they are pretty much never inaccessible?
Young people can easily search for a tiny nugget of relevant information amidst a tidal wave of useless info - a skill formally known as “Google-fu”. They can navigate a heavy flow of content without getting confused and have an excellent visual AND audio memory, which is why they’ll remember that they saw this meme 4 months ago, listened to this Vine 6 weeks ago and not reblog it even though they see like… 9000+ memes a day.
T)-(3Y A!S0 P0Z3S T)(3 AB1L33TY3Z T0 M4K3 S!NC3 0F !NF0Mr4710n Pr3Z3NT3D 1N 4N UFN4M1L14R F0rM4TZ QuIK!Y.
(They also possess the ability to make sense of information presented in an unfamiliar format quickly).
They assimilate new information rapidly. They recognize familiarity in new situations and synthesize it automatically. They focus on the message instead on the medium and so don’t NEED to give a fig if the spelling if off, the grammar is wonky, or - as shown in the example above - if half the letters aren’t even letters or placed in the right order. They glance at it and it makes sense. Why? Because their ability to ORGANIZE information in their minds is damned good. They may not have invented 733t5p34k (that says “leetspeak”) but they use it like bamfs (that says “bamfs”).
If they can’t “prioritize an itinerary or list”, it’s because they haven’t been taught how because people are too busy dismissing them as dumb instead of teaching them the skills they lack. Because one thing Millenials DON’T lack is the ability to quickly learn. Unless, of course, the method used isn’t user-friendly or intuitive, as is often the case in many MANY office environments determined to continue doing supremely ineffective things just because they’ve been done that way for ages. (One of my first jobs was filing the print-outs of emails into a binder. Talk about irrelevance.)
If Millennials are slow, it’s because they’re learning. Then they’re faster than you because they made an app to do the work more efficiently than they could manually. Millennials are damned good at optimisation, simplification and acceleration.
They’re also deeply emphatic, being capable of understanding a WIDE and complex range of emotions in the form of simple emojis, to the point of being able to have entire conversations where less than 20% is actually comprised of words. They can do this because they are capable of deducing tone and mood from subtleties like punctuation (or lack of it), caps and the time it takes to get a response.
And this makes them socially conscious, being more concerned with issues of injustice and oppression affecting a wide-range of people than any generation before them. That’s why Millennials also tend to be social activists and, overall, they volunteer more than any generation has before them.
Go figure, that’s how communication works in the fleshworld too where 80% of the message is non-verbal, represented in facial cues and silences and tone and body language rather than words. GO. FIGURE.
This attention to detail and strong interpersonal skills is also why Millennials tend to be such awkward ducklings. They’re sensitive and rightfully so. If you can tell that an Internet friend whose face you’ve never seen is in a bad mood because they’re not using enough caps, they’re using too many ellipses and they took just a tiny bit too long to type out “I’m okay”, you can DEFINITELY tell when your boss standing right in front of you is snubbing you, mocking you or thinking ill of you, even if they’re not saying it out loud.
With heightened sensitivity to people’s non-verbal that is learned by communicating online comes heightened sensitivity to people’s non-verbal. That means when people are being a jerk to Millennials in the Fleshworld, THEY CAN TELL even more easily than they can when it happens in the Networld. And yes, it hurts their feelings.
Unlike the older generations who thought it was uncool to acknowledge that their mental health exists, Millennials know very well that their mental health exists (many of them having sought out and received diagnosis for their mental illnesses) and it is IMPORTANT to them that they heal. They want to stop hurting. They want to stop being depressed and anxious and stressed. They’re not ashamed of having feels (even though it stresses them to know it’s still socially unacceptable to have the aforementioned feels for some reason). Why should they be? They’re human.
So yeah. That Millennials are dumb is a myth. That they can’t communicate is a lie. They’re not incapable of communicating and I would even argue that they communicate DAMN well. They just do it in a manner YOU don’t understand. Because times have changed.
Oh and, most importantly, within the next 10 years they will be the vast majority of the work-force which automatically means that they’re not unemployable because if they were, the economy would collapse and it would be the Financial Apocalypse.
There is no such thing as an unemployable generation or group of people. What does exist is people who are unwilling to look at a group’s strengths and give them tasks adapted to their skillsets, instead trying to force round pegs into square holes and mocking the pegs viciously for not fitting in with a system that was never designed for them in the first place.
Millennials are the rising tide in a world that is going to have to forcibly adapt to their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses - just like was done during every other inter-generational shift in power, by the way. And this will happen whether the older generation wants it to or not because, within the next decade, Millennials will be the most acting members in both society and the economy.
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