Understanding millennials in workforce

Search the term “millennials” on the internet and you’ll find a slew of articles, essays and thinkpieces trying to figure out the inner workings of the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.

There are no specific dates that define the scope of the millennial generation, but many agree that it consists of people born between 1980 and 2000. That’s a pretty large age range and covers a large number of people — more than 80 million, by many accounts — but that hasn’t stopped some from trying to analyze, categorize, summarize and proselytize about the various ways in which millennials are doing, well, everything.

Berkeley Executive Education, a division of the university’s Haas School of Business, is building a program completely around demystifying millennials in the workforce. Held in early February, it’s a two-day program called #Managing Mill en ni a ls: Unleashing the Power of Millennials.

Instructor Holly Schroth, a social psychologist and senior lecturer at Haas, has written in the past about her finding that “millen- nials want to be respected.”

“This may not seem controversial, but it is the crux of difficult relations between millennials and Gen X/Boomers in the workplace,” Schroth wrote in an article on LinkedIn earlier this year. “Millen- nials indicate that they initially respect the authority of the boss but will quickly lose that respect if the boss doesn’t show this respect back.”