Friday, April 01, 2016

Are Millennials Really All That Different?

Fast Company's Jared Lindzon has written a good article this week about the myth vs. reality when it comes to millennials and their differences relative to those of us from other generations.  She draws upon the work of Jessica Kriegel, a researcher from Drexel University.   Here's an excerpt from Lindzon's article:  

When Jessica Kriegel set out to write her doctoral dissertation on the unique attributes of the millennial generation, she discovered one major problem: There weren’t any.  "As I was reading all of the different books, research articles, and peer-reviewed studies on generational difference, I started to realize how much contradiction there is in the literature," says Kriegel, who earned a PhD in educational leadership with a specialization in human resources management from Drexel University in 2013. "I realized it's all kind of made up. There's not a lot of hard data that supports any of these assumptions. It's all anecdotal, case studies, research studies with 200 people that they apply to the broader population, and it's really damaging... People are using the stats to sell whatever it is they're selling, and journalists are using the stats to tell a compelling story, whether one exists or not," she says. "It's way more interesting to say, 'We figured out millennials, they are X,' than it is to say, 'Well, we can't really label because that's stereotyping, and so in reality we're going to just continue to remain vague about what we know."

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