New Rules
Baby boomers and millennials might have eased by each other in the workplace with no clash at all, as boomers gradually retired and millennials moved in and up the ranks. But a faltering economy changed all that.
Over the past 15 months, the stock market has wiped out US$2 trillion in Americans' retirement savings, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And even before the financial crisis hit full force, a February 2008 survey by job site CareerBuilder.com revealed that nearly three out of five US workers age 50 or older were planning to look for work elsewhere after retiring from their current jobs.
And that can put them into competition with candidates their children's ages, says Horne, because once an employee retires, he loses his seniority. "I have realistic expectations that I'm not going to be appointed vice president," he says.
As boomers struggle to resuscitate their careers and millennials flood the workforce, IT managers are having to rethink what it means to be an IT professional and to weigh the relative value of traditional and new-age skills.
That's not always easy. For example, millennials have a tendency to eat, sleep and breathe Web 2.0 technologies, and the value of that may not be immediately clear to a hiring manager.
"When my boomer colleagues see me texting, blogging and using wikis, they see it as social" as opposed to work-related, says Brett Gardner Bonner, a 26-year-old engineering specialist at FedEx. "But they're just tools I use to achieve higher results by gaining consensus and connecting with others."
Yet it's precisely these tools -- and users' proficiency levels -- that are dividing the generations into warring factions. "A millennial is more likely to communicate electronically or be more involved in social networking," says Sherry Aaholm, FedEx's vice president of IT.
Take, for example, Bonner, who practically showers with his BlackBerry Storm and claims his familiarity with Web 2.0 tools is "almost innate." He says he regularly relies on wikis, Twitter and microblogging services like Yammer to communicate with colleagues and swap information. "Boomers prefer conference calls and e-mails, whereas I prefer texting and wikis," says Bonner.