MEET GENERATION Z, THE FIRST POST-MILLENNIAL GENERATION

In the United States in 2016, the Millennials passed the Boomers to become the largest generation in the labour force, and they continue to grow as a percentage of corporate employees.¹ But organizations have now had 20 years to figure out how they tick. In 2019 the oldest Millennial is 38, and is probably a vice-president in your company.²

A new cohort of young people is chasing them into the workforce at a gallop. Above all, we know that the members of Generation Z are very different from their predecessors.³

In place of Millennial confidence, assertiveness, and, some would say, a certain sense of entitlement, their successors come to the world of work with a more practical approach to life. They are more open-minded and they expect to have to work hard to earn their right to be here. These young people have never known a world without the internet, and social media has dominated their formative years.⁴

One side-effect of their technological upbringing, it has been said, is that their attention spans have been known to flash by and vanish into the ether. But even if that were more than a stereotype, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

They are the masters of multitasking. The speed at which they can parse large volumes of changing information is breathtaking. And their native ability to communicate it in highly-concentrated forms is unprecedented. It’s mesmerizing, if you’re paying attention, to watch a post-Millennial shoot a video, edit it, and integrate it with other sources of media with just a few swipes on his or her smartphone. It’s fascinating to experience the fluency with which they participate in and consume real-time data streams, to see them generate continuous pulses of multimedia that operate simultaneously across several distributed platforms.⁷

For Generation Z, every moment is a micro-moment.

Find out how one Fortune 500 auto company used microlearning to prepare 10,000 salespeople for a high-stakes new product introduction. See the first in our upcoming series of case studies, Let’s Make a Dealer: Examples of Microlearning in Action.

Sridhar Ramaswamy. How Micro-Moments Are Changing the Rules, Google (April 2015): 2, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/how-micromoments-are-changing-rules/.
Richard Fry, “Millennials Are the Largest Generation in the U.S. Labor Force,” PEW Research Center, April 11, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/.
Michael Dimock, “Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/.
Dimock, “Defining Generations.” An earlier version of this article stated that demographers had not yet settled on a name for the immediate successors to the Millennials. Naming a generation isn't an exact science. But, according to the Pew Research Center, the momentum shifted decisively in 2018. Several major trendsetters, including Merriam-Webster, the Oxford English Dictionary, and even the Urban Dictionary, a popular online source of contemporary youth slang, now endorse the term “Generation Z” to identify the cohort born beginning in 1997.

bron https://surge9.com/definition-microlearning/