The workplace has had a dramatic shift in the past 50 years with businesses shifting from solely brick and mortar to being operated and created through the internet. Attitudes towards work have greatly changed, particularly when it comes to Gen X and millennials.
What is Gen X and Millennial?
Someone from Gen X is anyone who is born between years 1965 to 1980 and a millennial includes anyone born from 1981 to 1997.
Millennials have come into a new era where businesses and stores can be made completely online and having more access to information than ever has definitely had a huge impact on the workplace.
There has been a significant percentage of millennials now drawn towards the idea of entrepreneurship and starting their own businesses. A recent survey with the company Ferratum discovered that “3 in 5 millennials want to start their own business”. There is also a shift in the interest of improving overall work ethic and personal development. Ferratrum also discovered that “Millennials are twice as likely to be willing to work weekends in a second job compared to Gen X”.
A lot of millennials also now have a higher interest in furthering their education and having opportunities to learn. Ferratum’s survey also revealed that “69% of millennials wish they had more access to training at work and that 55% of millennials are planning to start a new course in the next 12 months, the most popular course being business and management”.
Gen X, on the other hand, can be far more risk-averse in comparison with 30% of Gen X being unwilling to take the risk of setting up their own business with “fear of failure” as the main reason.
In Conclusion
As a millennial myself, I completely can relate to the draw of entrepreneurship and having a higher focus on self-improvement. We are living in a society now where if you put in the work and stay committed you can absolutely achieve results and have the chance to change your life. The career I’m working on now didn’t exist during Gen X’s time, so it’s understandable how Gen X doesn’t have the same approach to the workplace.
I’m very grateful to have been born into a generation with such high amounts of opportunity that didn’t exist before and I feel that millennials now should be encouraged to spent time on self-improvement and attempting to build their own businesses if that’s what they want to do. According to Ferratum’s study as well, around 47% of millennials in the workplace feel that they are being underpaid for their efforts so it shows why there is such a high interest in starting their own businesses one day.
Ferratum also mentioned that experts are predicting that millennials will make up 35% of the world’s workforce by 2020, so it will be exciting to see how things grow and change over the next few years.
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