Naked Generations addresses leading Energy Industry executives

Get Energy Events, a global conferencing company, providing education and insights into the Energy industry, has invited Naked Generations to run a workshop at their annual Exploration and Production conference in London.  The slot will be delivered by Christopher Lomas (Naked Generations CEO) and will be entitled: ‘Explaining Y: Understanding, Creating and Managing strategic relationships with Generation Y’.  The session will ‘lift the lid’ on Generation Y and take attendees into the mindset of the generation.  We will be explaining why it is critical for company leaders to understand this generation not just as Employees but as Consumers and Competitors too.

The conference will be held from the 23-25 March 2009 at the Business Design Centre in North London, United Kingdom.  For more details see the Get Energy Events website.

Temp Generation

One of the recurring complaints we hear about Generation Y revolves around the issue of ‘job-hopping’ as we have said elsewhere on this blog (“Gen Y playing leap-frog”). The Generation Y population seems to find it tough stay in one place for any length of time and it is giving employers a headache, putting a strain on both finances and morale. “It would be really helpful, especially in our line of work [relationship management]... if they could stay for at least five years” says one Investment Bank relationship director.

According to the RBS/ NatWest Student Living Index, the number of university students that also take on part-time employment is up at 42%, of all those in Higher Education. This is a sharp rise over the last few years, where previously there was a downward trend, and has gone up to as many as 750,000 in the UK per annum.[1] Student work also revolves around seasonal contracts (Christmas, Easter, Summer holidays), meaning that the concept of full-time work on a long-term basis may be quite an alien concept to most graduates, when they leave university – they’re not used to it.

This increase in contract work is supported by the expansion of the temporary work industry, which has grown five times more than national employment since 1990,[2] which correlates with the unprecedented numbers of redundancies during the 1990s (also well documented in previous blogs). From a commercial perspective, these two events suggest that many businesses believe it to be cost effective to hire some employees on a temporary basis. From a cultural perspective, however, the diminished idea of a ‘job for life’, plus the increasing availability of temporary work does not encourage a mindset of working for a corporate firm on a long-term basis.

This suggests that Generation Y graduates, rather than being lazy or disloyal, are merely working as they always have, on a short-term basis.

All of this supports the kinds of client requests that we see, who are asking us to build longevity into mindset and career paths of Generation Y inside their own businesses.

[1] http://www.easier.com/view/Finance/Household_Bills/Spending_Habits/article-195278.html
[2] http://www.salary.com/personal/layoutscripts/psnl_articles.asp?tab=psn&cat=cat011&ser=ser032∂=par362