Millennials are #1...in the workforce
A transformation has occurred in the American labor force. Millennials are now the largest generational group on the job.
The Pew Research Center, using Census Bureau data from this year, finds 53.5 million U.S. workers are aged 18 to 34, surpassing Gen X-ers, who are at 52.7 million.
Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task says that’s not a shocker.
“This is just demographics, this is inevitable,” he argues. “As the Baby Boomers are retiring, the Millennial generation is coming into the workforce in bigger numbers.”
What IS shocking to Task is the effort employers are making to get and retain Millennials on their payrolls.
“A lot of companies are trying to do anything and everything they can to keep Millennials happy because they’re such a big force and they’re notoriously fickle-- they’ll say, 'you know what, I don’t like this job, I’m out of here, I’m going somewhere else,'” he explains. “That’s a problem for employers.”
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Yahoo Senior Columnist Michael Santoli feels the new workplace dominance of Millennials will likely change the way the entire group is viewed by others of different generations.
“One result of all this is we’re finally going to get away from the pigeonholing of Millennials as people who operate in a very specific way,” he says. “We have all these stereotypes of they’re different, they’re a different species from you and me, they don’t respond to the same motivations, they need to be supported more in different ways and need reinforcement.”
And Task points out Millennials are already becoming more like their older siblings in their personal lives.
“Let’s go back a few years ago-- Millennials weren’t going to buy houses, they weren’t going to get married, they weren’t going to have kids-- and by the way, they’re doing all those things,” he points out. “Maybe they’re doing them a little bit later than prior generations.”
Santoli says that makes sense.
“Maybe they’re entering these different life phases just a little bit later just because the economy was so bad when they were getting in the job market,” he adds.
Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster-- a Millennial herself-- notes that Goldman Sachs (GS) has a new report trying to predict ways to make money in the stock market with those Millennial life phases.
“They have some names that people should buy if you want to bet on Millennial parents,” she explains. “They include Whole Foods (WFM), Target (TGT), Disney (DIS), Netflix (NFLX), Grubhub (GRUB).”
But Santoli argues these kinds of plays would make sense in any generation having babies.
“There’s not anything different about this generation that they buy their kids Carter’s (CRI) clothes or toys from Disney,” he notes. “It’s just there’s a wave and probably a pent up supply of babies.”
Task points out it’s a no-brainer for business to try to capitalize on these demographics.
“All that baby-making and just the size of the population, there’s money to be made, so everybody’s doing that,” he adds. “That’s why every media company in the world is trying to figure out how to appeal to Millennials.”
However, when it comes to work, Santoli feels that in the end Millennials will likely be no different than those who came before them.
“I don’t really think we’re going to come out of this and say that they’ve transformed the workplace any more than preceding generations did,” he says.
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