The Gen Y Guide

What do you get when you raise kids to believe they can do anything, give them all the technical gadgets they’ll need to make that happen, send them off to excellent schools, and then spit them out into a job market where companies fight tooth and nail for the privilege of employing them?

Generation Y.

Check out these statistics: people aged 55 to 65 make up about 15 per cent of B.C.’s population. Those aged 18 to 28: almost exactly the same. Now consider that the B.C. economy added 400,000 new jobs in the past 10 years. Clearly these youngsters are among the hottest commodities in the province, not to mention around the world.

Gen Y – also known as Generation Next, the Millennials and the Echo Boom – has more power and greater choices than any cohort to come before it, and companies around the world are trying desperately to understand who they are, what they want and how they work.

Graphic: Gen Y timeline

With the dominant baby boomer generation starting to retire, the challenge for businesses can be boiled down to three big questions: How do you attract young workers in an increasingly competitive labour market? How do you manage them successfully when their attitudes and behaviours differ from their older workmates? And how do you market to them as their spending power grows? You need help, and we’ve done the research.

We’ll tell you about some B.C. companies that have devoted plans to deal with Gen Y. Each has recognized that this generation brings unique challenges to business, and each has accepted a critical idea: in this labour market, businesses are adapting to Gen Y, not the other way around.

One quick note at the outset: Gen Y describes the children of the baby boomers, but there is no consensus on exactly what age group this refers to. For the sake of this article, it includes anyone born after 1979, based on what Canadian demographers call the Echo Boom.

What Y wants PricewaterhouseCoopers' pitch

For 23-year-old Mike Woodward, landing his first career job was hard work – in a way. B.C.’s major companies hosted nightly career events for a solid month during his last year in UBC’s accounting

It’s probably fair to say that those who remember recessions have a very different idea of what it’s like to look for a job. But this is a boom-time generation.

In the end, Woodward opted for Pricewaterhouse-Coopers LLP (PWC), where he’s been working for just under a year. And wouldn’t you know, they’re throwing yet another career fair his way. This time it’s an attempt by the HR gurus to ensure he’s not too easily tempted away by competing firms.

Advice: Catch and keep

A knot of PWC department heads have come from as far as China to speak at their Vancouver office’s waterfront tower, all with a consistent message for the 100-plus twentysomethings in the room: if you ever want to work overseas or switch careers or work with a new boss, you can do it without leaving the firm.

If this makes the multinational professional-services giant seem desperate and the small group of B.C. youngsters seem spoiled, the youth here don’t seem to mind. Amy Cunningham, for example, is a success story PWC had to work for. Over a table decked with cookies, carrot sticks and pamphlets, the smiling 28-year-old Aussie says she has worked for PWC for 11 years. In Australia they’re hiring new staff before they’ve finished school; she was recruited at 17. Before coming to Vancouver, she worked in Sydney, Australia, and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Of the 30 peers who started with her, about 25 have since changed offices, most to other countries, many to other companies. PWC had no trouble accommodating her travelling itch, Cunningham says: “It was an opportunity for the firm to work with me, so it was a win-win situation.”

Would she have left the firm if her bosses hadn’t been so amenable? “Absolutely.”

• 13 reads