Employers look beyond Millenials
Looking to secure the future of their businesses, employers are reaching out to Generation Z, extending internship opportunities to high schools.
CHICAGO — Many teens spend their summers lifeguarding or icecream scooping. Not Evon Lopez.
Lopez, at 16, spent the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school interning at Abbott Laboratories. At graduation from the eight-week program last August, she delivered a PowerPoint presentation detailing, among other things, corporate safety initiatives at the health care company headquartered outside Chicago.
Sound like a snooze? To the contrary, Lopez said the experience reinforced her interest in architectural engineering.
Asked to name the highlights of the program, the teen described a visit to Abbott’s nutrition facility in Ohio where employees explained how they created formula to save infants’ lives.
“It just shows that their goal is to help as many people as they can in any way possible,” Lopez said of the company, “and that’s a place that I would like to work in.”
An interest in jobs with a greater social purpose is a hallmark of the millennial generation. But Lopez is a member of Generation Z, the postmillennial group that is just starting to graduate from high school and college and catch the interest of employers.
Gen Z is composed of the kids who were born, roughly, between 1995 and 2010 and came of age during the Great Recession.
Though it’s too soon to say how Gen Z might shape the workplace, early surveys paint a portrait distinct from the wide-eyed, self-involved image of their millennial predecessors. Gen Zers, an emerging trove of research suggests, are entrepreneurial yet pragmatic, hardworking yet easily distracted, with a streak of realism running through their desire to make a social impact.
Some employers are trying to appeal to Gen Z early, with versions of internships normally reserved for college students now being extended to high schoolers to create a pipeline of talent.
At Abbott, which started its high school internship five years ago, starting younger also is meant to address the shortfall of women and minorities in the STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — workforce, which is important as it serves an increasingly diverse customer base.
“What we want to do is increase the possibility that they will enter STEM, be successful at it and be able to go on and have meaningful careers in these areas,” said Corlis Murray, Abbott’s top engineer and leader of the high school internship program. “The younger we reach them, the higher we increase that probability.”
With the rise of early professional exposure, members of Gen Z are positioned for powerful careers, said Jeanne Meister, partner at Future Workplace, a human resources research firm in New York.
“They are definitely more serious and mature entering the workforce” than millennials, Meister said.
Assigning sweeping generalizations to a generation of 60 million people is, at best, an inexact exercise, but that doesn’t stop a steady drip of research from offering varied takes on Gen Z.
“They are radically different from millennials,” said David Stillman, co-author, with his 17-year-old son Jonah, of the book “Gen Z @ Work,” released in March.
If everyone-gets-a-trophy millennials, reared by baby boomers during flush times, prioritized passion and teamwork, then Gen Z, raised by independent Generation Xers during times of financial distress, learned that you have to fight hard to win, Stillman said.
“We have a generation entering the workforce that is extremely competitive,” said Stillman, who has written several books on how generations interact in the workplace.
Some Gen Z traits seem oldschool.
Three-quarters of Gen Zers say they are willing to start at the bottom and work their way to the top, implying a respect for paying dues, Stillman’s research found. More than 60 percent said they are willing to stay at a company for 10 years, suggesting a return to employer loyalty after the job-hopping tendencies of millennials. Only 8 percent said they want an open-office concept, despite workspace design trends that have been knocking down walls to emphasize collaboration.
But other traits are less traditional. For example, more than half of Gen Zers want to write their own job description, reflecting a desire for a hypercustomized career experience that could be driven by the personal branding that social media has pushed since they were kids, Stillman said.
That preference could draw them to small and medium-sized businesses, where employees can more easily wear multiple hats than at large companies, he said.
Indeed, a survey last year by Accenture of the 2016 graduating college class, by some measures the vanguard of Gen Z, found they are three times more likely to want to work at a small or medium company than a large one, presenting big companies with a recruiting challenge.
Some employers are being proactive by planting a seed early.
Southwest Airlines last summer hosted its third class of high school interns, who worked for eight weeks at the company’s Dallas headquarters. This fall it plans to host its first “aviation day” for kids in third through eighth grade, a free event that will include guest speakers and a tour of an aircraft maintenance hangar.