Retaining Generation Y

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. ñ Ninth House, Inc., the leadership solutions company, and nationally syndicated career columnist and Yahoo! Finance career expert, Penelope Trunk, have teamed up to offer the industry advice about employee recruitment and retention as it relates to an up-and-coming Generation Y.

In the recently released The Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, Ninth House CEO, Jeff Snipes, and the bookís author, Penelope Trunk, offer a wealth of information that todayís corporations and their new leaders can utilize to cultivate success. Ninth House is known for bringing high-quality, immersive, interactive leadership solutions to Fortune 500 companies. The companyís offerings touch on the very topics of retaining and engaging young talent. Penelope Trunk is a nationally syndicated career columnist and an expert about the issues and concerns of a new generation of workers under the age of 35.

ìNinth House gets it!î notes Trunk. ìNinth House understands what is needed to inspire young workers and develop them into successful leaders ñ and they offer solutions to help companies do just that.î

ìThe quality and delivery of Ninth House solutions make learning more like watching a movie rather than viewing a PowerPoint,î notes Snipes. ìNinth House and its clients have found that interactive, story-based video is the ideal medium for training the newest generation of workers who crave constant interaction and the ability to be immersed in the content in order to retain what theyíve learned and bring new skills back to the actual work environment.î

Because the Gen Y generation is good at working in teams, itís important for them to look for work in an environment that values teamwork over the old-school hierarchal based organization. Snipes notes in Trunkís book that there are three key questions Gen Y should ask of a potential employer:

ï What sort of talent development does the company provide?
ï Is diversity important to the company?
ï Is there a reward system in place for teams?

Other points that Snipes/Trunk address in the book include:

ï New methodologies for companies training Generation Y employees

ï Learning on the job through employee training programs

ï Three types of training employees should ask for at work

ï Effectively managing organizational shifts from hierarchical to competency based teams

Generation Y is generally referred to as the 76 million Americans born after 1982 who are just entering the work force in mass. Generation Y has also been referred to as ìGeneration Why?î noting the age groupís quest for answers and, sometimes, the questioning of authority. A recent research report from Bersin and Associates on talent management* notes that this new group of workers are confident, impatient, socially conscious, family-centric, and technology-savvy, and require work related training to ìÖgive context and meaning, make it fun, search and explore, entertain me.î

The exiting of the huge baby boomer generation leaves a significant hole in the workforce and in companiesí leadership pipelines - a gap which Gen Y employees will fill. According to a the Bersin report, this phenomena has created the #1 talent problem today, leaving many companies grappling with how to effectively train and develop a new generation of leaders. (*High-Impact Talent Management, Bersin and Associates, 2007).