YouDig?

Dear YouDig?

Are You Prepared for a Millennial Workforce?

Dear YouDig?

We are a design build firm. We have a veteran team of professionals. We are realizing that these vets may want to retire someday so, we have hired a series of up-and-coming professionals, but we seem to be having trouble keeping them around.  They don’t seem to have the patience to climb the corporate ladder. How do we attract and keep these younger pros while maintaining the culture that made us so successful?

-Millennials Are Sure Hip

Dear  M-A-S-H,

Millennials are more than hip M-A-S-H. They are here to take your cookies. Millennials are loosely defined as those born between 1982 and 2002 with a soft edge on each end of that spectrum. Soft edge or not, the millennials are a force. They have been raised with rapidly-changing technology and educated differently than any generation before them. They were raised on the likes of Google, iPhones and Wi-Fi, which provided them instant access to general but important information that the rest of us spent semester after semester trying to memorize and spit out for a final exam. Technology and their comfort with it give them opportunities for rapid advancement or entrepreneurship never before available in the industrial age or probably ever. Sooooo, know this M-A-S-H… THEY ARE SMARTER AND MORE PREPARED THAN THEY LOOK.

The motivated among “them” focus on innovation and technology, and yes…. in traditional industries (ask a Cabbie about Uber). YouDig? is happy the light bulb went off because the construction industry is no exception. They possess skills your seasoned staff doesn’t have, especially in the technology arena. They are extremely flexible and more than willing to uproot and move to another State, another business or… brace yourself… YOUR COMPETITOR WITH YOUR SECRETS AND TRAINING.  Just look at them; they won’t care if they take your place while you deliberately calibrate the obvious need for change with the pace of an ocean freighter–nor should they.

So M-A-S-H, this is a command.  Get rid of the ladder.  This is not a “can’t beat them, join them” scenario. This is straight up JOIN THEM.  Immediately integrate the seasoned with the millennials and the young. Give them clear incentive to stay with you (money, profit sharing, progressive workplace and opportunity).  If you don’t, you and your staff might find yourselves working for a millennial.

-YouDig? 

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