Earlier this month, TeamFit hosted another of its open conversations. This time, we engaged with a group of extremely smart, energetic, fun young consultants from the Millennial generation. This demographic will make up the majority of the workforce by about 2020, only five years from now, and this year they should become the single largest demographic in the workforce.

For a great report on this generation in the United States see Millenials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions Networked with Friends from the Pew Research Center (the figure below defining the different generations comes from this report).

This was an opinionated group. It included our friends who have just started a big data consulting company here at VentureLabs, the marketing lead for SnugVest (a compelling Vancouver start-up providing solutions for people with autism spectrum disorder) and people in environmental and IT consulting. We even had a board game designer in the group, and we gave out copies of his game to participants.

Dan Straker and his brother Rob launched their board game Escape From Sunset Island: Zombie Apocalypse Simulator late in 2014. The game was a big hit with this group. What is this obsession with Zombies? The way they described gameplay, where people have to co-operate to gather resources and escape the zombies, but can also benefit from betraying each other, seemed to some to characterize work!

Career Expectations – Multi-Threaded Careers

Millennials expect to work for multiple companies over their careers. Most have already had experience working inside companies and on freelance project teams and expect that to be the pattern of their career. Most surveys confirm this. The Deloitte Millennial Survey from back in January 2014 found that “Roughly 70 percent of Millennials see themselves as working independently at some point in their lives, rather than being employed within a traditional organizational structure.”

Social – Meeting Up, Connecting and Having Fun

This generation grew up with technology. They are already jaded by conventional social platforms like FaceBook, they are on LinkedIn but find it ‘dull’ or ‘slow,’ and rely on apps on their phones to be part of social networks. They expect their professional networks and collaboration tools to be every bit as mobile. This is the generation where a majority of people first meet using social dating sites like Plenty of Fish (TeamFit product and UX lead Felix Tin was at Plenty of Fish before joining us) and it is the generation that Tinder is meant for (if you are not part of this generation Tinder wants to charge you more to join). Given that they find relationships of all kinds on-line, they are also interested in using platforms like TeamFit to find jobs and build project teams.

Technical – Big Data and Analytics

Data and analytics are seen as a key trend by this group. I don’t think that this was the result of having two doctorates in big data analytics in our discussions. Everyone shared their stories of how analytics will impact decisions and their lives. This is the generation that grew up with the World Wide Web. They expect ‘facts’ to be available and many of the ‘facts’ to be wrong. So they have developed strategies for multi-sourcing data to see what ‘facts’ are supported and then triangulating an answer that incorporates these different perspectives. The ability to understand and integrate multiple sources of data is a key skill and one that Millennials have learned from their highly media-saturated world. Well, at least for these Millennials, who are admittedly a pretty elite group within.

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