Military Careers, Second Careers - Army Times

Gen X: Not as strange as boomers believe

Larry Ballard and I write this column week after week to help give young readers insight into the working world. We slave to bring cutting-edge observations and useful commentary to those who are still 30 years or more away from retirement.

This week I decided to focus on older workers. I am providing a useful guide to help baby boomers understand Generation Xers.

I have pulled together an unofficial reference (and some trivia) for anyone who doesn’t fit into the aforementioned group of younger workers.

With help from trusty Google, the Magic Eight Ball and our local HR professionals, we came up with some things you need to know about Generation X workers:

We don’t plan on being at this job for the next 30 years.

It just ain’t going to happen. If we don’t win the Powerball and say “see ya” to this cube farm, then we’ll probably find something else that strikes our fancy (a.k.a. when Heineken comes looking for a beer taster). Seriously, this probably won’t be our last job.

The average employee in his or her late twenties, for example, has already switched jobs five or six times. Disclaimer: I have had four since I graduated from college. (But I really like this one.) Xers just don’t see job-jumping as a bad thing.

It doesn’t mean that we aren’t contributing while we’re there. And many of us are happy living on the cheap. (I can’t speak for the whole generation on that one. After all, I am a journalist.)

We do pick up skills along the way and want to make a difference at the company we are working for, whether we work for three years or three decades.

It doesn’t mean we aren’t loyal, but it does mean that we value different things. We prefer job satisfaction over job titles, work/life balance over tenure, and happy hour over making sure our boss sees us at our desk at 5 p.m., even if we are just watching the latest JibJab.

We can listen to music and carry on a conversation at the same time.

It’s not that hard, really. We grew up with Walkmans and MTV and have spent the last 20-plus years only listening to what we think is relevant to us. ... What’s that I hear? Lattes?!? Wait for me.

OK, I’m back.

More important, music usually helps us focus. It also makes us able to multitask.

So as long as we aren’t humming along to K-Fed, who cares?

9 to 5 is not part of our vocabulary.

Generation X, and even more so, the millennials coming after us, are dedicated to completing the task at hand. After that, we consider ourselves done. We work when there is work to do, and when there is not, we would rather be doing something else.

Time is a commodity for us, and if that means shifting hours or working weekends, most are more amenable to that than to counting ceiling tiles or sitting in endless meetings.

(Think we’re bad, wait until you get to the millennial workers like Emmalee Bauer, 25, of Elkhart, Iowa. She was fired for detailing, in a diary on her employer’s computer, all the ways she found to goof off at work.) But most of us would exchange an hour at noon to visit our kids in school for an hour on the weekend or at the end of the day.

Lesson to employers: Be flexible.

We’re not all the same.

Just like all generations, we can’t be characterized as a homogeneous group. This generation has as many differences as the baby boomer generation. (You can’t all be like Donald Trump, can you?)

Here’s the trivia portion: The term “Generation X” was the title of a popular book written in 1991 by Douglas Coupland.

It is a fictional work about three strangers who decide to distance themselves from society to get a better sense of who they are.

He describes the characters as “underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable.” And those characteristics can describe 48 million people in United States?

I don’t think so.

We do care.

Having more than one job in a lifetime may be seen by older generations as disloyal, but I would beg to differ.

We are loyal, it’s just not a blind loyalty to a company.

In a study released by Catalyst, a nonprofit corporate membership research and advisory organization, 47 percent of Generation X professionals say they would be happy spending the rest of their careers with their current organization; 85 percent care a great deal about the future of their organization; and 83 percent say they are willing to go beyond what is normally expected to ensure the success of that organization.

For me, if a company treats me well, I will do the same by it.

(Karen Mracek and Larry Ballard of The Des Moines Register take turns writing the WorkBytes column each week. Write the columnists at The Des Moines Register, P.O. Box 957, Des Moines, IA, 50304-0957.)