At this point, who hasn’t written a thinkpiece on millennials in the workplace? Some people call them selfish, entitled, and lacking a sense of loyalty. Others rush in to defend millennials, arguing that these claims are all rubbish. Sometimes it gets pretty messy. But as a startup made up almost entirely of millennials, we obviously have a vested interest in this conversation. So here we are, wading in right into this debate.
Honestly, you don’t even need to pay that much attention to actual articles to get the gist of what many of them are saying. You can get the tl;dr just by listening to older relatives rant about the “strawberry generation” at family gatherings. Millennials, the story goes, are lazy, weak, and unable to hold out through tough times. Then there’s the hard data: a vast majority of millennials already have their sights set on leaving the company they’re currently at in the near future (and before you jab fingers at other people, this applies locally as well, not just other people in ang moh countries). Putting two and two together, people paint millennials as serial job-hoppers, eager to leave their jobs because they’re ungrateful and never happy with their work. Ouch, that kinda hurt to type out.
Oh my god, you cry, throwing your hands up in the air. Are we millennials, with our seemingly irredeemable selfish ways, set to ruin the future of humanity with our sense of entitlement?
Calm down. Take a chill pill. Hear us out.
For one, job hopping might actually be symptomatic of a very insidious phrase you’ve probably heard all your life – “Follow Your Passion”. It’s definitely no coincidence that you’ve seen the phrase on basically every motivational poster. College professor Cal Newport notes that “Follow Your Passion” saw a surge in usage during many millennials’ formative years. (In fact, we’re actually guilty of that on this blog: just last week we posted about discovering your passion.) Similarly, as this other wonderfully illustrated article about millennials points out, the phrase “a secure career” has gone out of style, while “a fulfilling career” has started trending (well not like on Twitter, but you get the point). So it seems that we millennials are really #obsessed with this “finding your passion” thing, for better or for worse, because we’ve been made to believe it since we were kids.
From this perspective, it’s not that millennials are ungrateful, but rather, we just have very different priorities from our parents. No longer satisfied with simply getting the bills paid, we aspire to work in jobs that fit in with our world view. If we feel like the desk-bound, pencil pushing job we have doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose, then we’ll probably set our sights on alternative career choices. This also makes sense given the increasingly vibrant startup scene here in Singapore, which let’s be honest, isn’t the safest industry to be in (we’d know about that). So while millennials might indeed be job hoppers, it’s not always because of an inherent sense of selfishness. It’s simply that we’ve grown up believing in a need for fulfillment in our careers, that goes beyond getting rolls of dollah dollah bills.
Obviously, as a startup that matches you – your strengths and aspirations – with companies that fit, we believe it’s very possible to marry passion with a career. Heck, we think it’s almost an imperative – and we’re not just saying because we want to get you guys on board. (Okay, maybe a little bit. Just a little.)
So ultimately, what’s our $0.02 on millennials? Well, maybe millennials aren’t set to ruin the world. We’re just different, and that doesn’t always mean that we’re bad.
Venn Jobs 