Last Day at Work

One of my good friends at work left today for another job, and another
is leaving next week. Said goodbye today, though I imagine I'll see
her "around." Both of these people came to our group at around the
same time I did, and they are both a little over 30, like me, so it
makes me think about a couple of things:

1) NPR recently ran a story on morning edition about
generational differences in the workplace. To paraphrase that, and add
some comments on my own-remember of course, these are generalities and
sterotypes:

Number one difference between the baby boomers (who tend to be our
bosses), and the gen xers (i.e. me and my departing friends) is the
time staying at one employer. We xers tend to stick around for 3-5
years. That's enough time to learn useful skills, contribute to the
workplace, and then begin to desire to learn new skills, which are
generally not available in the same workplace. These days, the skills
one needs on the job are always changing. Jobs change. Technologies
change. Missions change. xers thrive on this change, and we adapt
well, mainly because we are always trying to keep ahead of or at least
in step with changing trends. Moving to new positions, especially in
new employers, helps us stay abreast of new changes, and keeps us
employable. We generally see our most important asset as something
like "adaptability" or "learns quickly, " rather than thinking of some
particular area of expertise or skill. Good people, we think, are
good people, regardless of years of fortran programming experience.
That's why x-ers dominated the dot coms. There was no expertise, new
businesses were/are being invented.

Boomers tend to want to stay in the same position much longer, and
often see it as a failure (of employee or employer or both) if someone
leaves after a "short" time. Employers are tied more closely to one's
identity, and perhaps skills, business sectors, etc. didn't change as
rapidly in the past. An employer didn't have to work as hard to retain
a boomer, because they naturally wanted to stay. x-ers tend to
naturally want to move on after a while, and thus and employer must
work to retain them by offering development paths.

It begs the question, should employers even try to retain employees?
The traditional wisdom is that an employer should attempt to retain
employees. They should try to do the career development thing,
training, paths, etc. But why? Is it possible that new blood _is_
actually needed every once in a while, and maybe more often than it
used to be? Maybe we should strive for a workplace where everyone
shifts around every 5 years or so. Cross pollination, etc. It keeps
people out of the infamous comfort zone as well. Academia has done
this for years. grad students, post-docs, they all do great work
partially because they have short tenures then move on. The
institution attracts good grad students and post docs based not on
their pay but on the placement of the leaving postdocs and grad
students. Anyone who knows me knows I was not a big fan of the
academic life, but maybe in the big picture that's a sound model.
Rather than thinking of career development paths as trying to "retain"
good employees, think of them as "attracting" the next good employee.
Maybe that's a better model. Clearly there is personal and
situational variation, so the grad school model of pretty rigorous
timelines might not be appropriate, but employers should/are thinking
more about this model, rather than "stay with us forever." Presumably
many are, I wonder how far people are going with it.

Another interesting difference mentioned in the NPR piece was work-life
balance. Apparently xers want more outside life than boomers did. My
opinion is that so many xers saw their hard-working boomer parents'
relationships collapse and end in divorce and/or absentee parenting
that they want to avoid that. There is probably also something to be
said for women in the workplace who feel they have a right to be there,
rather than feeling they have to fight to prove that women can work.
This new generation of women workers probably is more vocal about
wanting time off for families. Hopefully modern fathers are becoming
more vocal as well, saying if the mother gets to take some time off,
the father should too. And hopefully (near to my heart) childless
folks are saying the same thing, "I don't have kids, but I should be
able to take time off just like s/he does. After all maybe I chose not
to have kids at this point because I wanted to do X, where X is not
work"

2) (I'll bet you don't remember what the numbers refer to:the 2 things
that my friends' departure made me think about-the NPR story and...)
What about me-should I leave soon too, since my peers are leaving, is
my alarm clock ticking? (Of course I recognize that my (potential)
employers might read this too, but I believe, perhaps idealistically,
in keeping a consistent, defensible set of beliefs and actions. If I
write something here that my employer has a problem with, they should
speak up, and if can't explain it honestly to their satisfaction, then
we do have a problem, but one that goes deeper than a few words on a
blog...)

As it turns out, while I've certainly thought about it more due to my
friends' departure, I don't really feel my alarm clock ticking. While
a lot of xers fall into the above feelings, I may be different. First
my job involves a lot of problem solving on a daily basis, which keeps
me fresh, I am still learning new things in my job. Secondly, I lived
in academia, with constant transitions, for a while, and I left, partly
to gain some stability. This bodes well for my current situation, and
badly for my alarm clock, since it seems to mean I value stability more
than the typical xer. Keeping abreast of change, and developing new
skills to cope with change certainly resonates with me strongly, but
perhaps I find ways of fitting that in, or maybe I am lucky, or maybe
my alarm will go off a little later.

Regardless, I think the xer/boomer patterns are interesting in general,
and probably both sets have something to gain from understanding the
others' patterns. It isn't a question of "old fogeys" and "young
upstarts" since I think the relevant comparisons are looking at
different generations when they were at the same place in their
careers/lives. It also isn't right and wrong, just different, boomers
need to recognize that the workplace will be increasingly dominated by
people with a different way of thinking, and xers need to realize that
others in the workplace may have a different natural expectation than
they do, and it isn't necessarily wrong.