Understanding the experiences and needs of a multigenerational workforce (opens in new tab)

We built an entire industry around increasing engagement stats and trying to convince the permanent servant underclass to buy more stuff.

You'd have to be utterly insane to find meaning in that.

what pay? we get paid?

The chart that showed which generations work most in which fields showed that gen-X and boomers work in areas that are less precarious than those populated by millennials.

I use the triad of "money, stability, and prestige," to weigh the value of a role. Young people are naturally attracted to the money-prestige roles, where older workers want stability-money roles. People who value prestige-stability roles tend to be in academia, where prestige-money roles are in the arts/media/politics/non-profit sectors. I am sure there is a gender/sex axis for these preferences as well.

In terms of what you need in a role, admit you need prestige to increase your profile that gets access to greater opportunity. Commit to valuing stability if the things that are important to you are not in the marketplace, and if money is truly your goal, recognize it's almost always made by forgoing prestige and stability - those things come after, if at all.

I couldn't gleam this information easily from the article, but I presume these surveys were given to each age group at the same time.

If that's correct, couldn't age (specifically life experience) play a large factor in the results? Certainly as I get older, my perspective on work -- and everything, really -- has been changing.

The article rests on a fundamental logical error. They claim to be measuring “millennials” versus “generation x” versus “baby boomers,” but actually they’re measuring 18-35 year olds, etc. Those are different groups. (Millennials will continue to be millennials even when they’re retired, for example.) Obviously, younger people will have less belief in the organizations mission, for example, since largely they’re still not the ones setting that mission. That doesn’t mean that millennials as a group find work less meaningful than their parents did at the same age.

Indeed, there is reason to believe the opposite. Millennials are generally more conservative than the baby boomers were at the same age: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservati.... That may carry over to attitudes towards things like work.

This is what happens when management still thinks they can just instill "loyalty" in their employees and we'll happily putt along without raises as they slowly cut more and more benefits and throw more "pizza parties" to compensate.

Peakon glassdoor reviews on the other hand are the worst. How a company in HR industry can have such review and still offer such weak explanations for employee engagement across different industries, at the same time be compliant to GDPR (i.e.: not have any insight from the data but highly aggregated stats?)

"Using our cutting edge analysis, we've empirically determined that highly-paid employees looking forward to their fat pensions are more satisfied with their working environment than low-paid employees with no benefits. That'll be $2MM for consulting on intergenerational workplaces, thanks."

The youngest boomer, on these calculations, is 54 going on 55. With some luck he or she has established a career.

At the mid-millenial age of 31, I wasn't happy about my pay, cause it wasn't much, or for part of the time about my work, because it was tedious and needed a change.

The article seems to imply direct causation of the results from membership in a 'generation', but it seems much more likely to be the result of length of time spent in the labor market.