Gen Y - Learning for the Future

by Zahra Petri

Have you ever felt that you were failing at everything you tried? Maybe you have many projects and tasks to accomplish but feel that you are not making progress. You may wonder if you’re doing anything correctly because no one is checking your work. This may not be the big problem you think it is; in fact, you may just learn differently.

At the end of last year, my company talked about learning styles in a team meeting. Much of the conversation was centered on the learning abilities of younger generations. Some of the highlights of Gen Y learners were:

• They want constant feedback to track their efforts and know what they can improve upon.
• They are creators and collaborators and do not adapt well to the work styles of three previous generations of learners.
• They are technology savvy and will jump from source to source until they find what they’re searching for.
• They are highly relationship and team oriented because they feed off brainstorming together and combining ideas.
• They can be impatient and skeptical, causing them to ask lots of questions and disengage quickly.
  

Does any of this sound familiar to you? It did to me. As soon as I heard some of these learning styles, I finally realized that I was not alone and nothing was wrong with me. I simply learn differently than some of my colleagues. I realized that I was not bad at the things I needed to accomplish, but in fact needed to go about them differently.

For projects, in order to stay on track and continue forward, I must follow The Effective Edge’s best practices for organizing a project. I must first state my desired outcome then lay out all the actions and steps as well as attach a timeline, if it’s time sensitive. Without this guideline and structure, I feel lost and have trouble completing what is necessary in order to excel at my job.

Trusting my system and performing regular maintenance checks keep me on track. Now I can spend more time learning and collaborating with the other generations of learners I work with.