activities (including both employee and customer training) amounted to just 0.7 percent of annual revenues in 2013.12 Part of the reason for this paltry less-than-1-percent investment? Companies are offering on-the-job training to far fewer employees than they used to. In fact, the proportion of employees receiving on-the-job training dropped 42 percent between 1996 and 2008.13
Those employees lucky enough to benefit from employer-sponsored training are receiving the bare minimum: in 2014, organizations spent an average of $1,229 per employee on learning opportunities—roughly the same amount they might spend on that employee’s annual printing costs.14 This amounts to a total of just 32.4 hours of training per employee.15 A paltry 13 percent of that training is dedicated to developing managerial or supervisory skills, a critical area of mastery for a generation poised to step into management roles within the next few years.16
Young employees have never been a top priority for companies when it comes to allocating leadership development and training resources. Yet talent management specialists do note that organizations approach Millennials’ development differently. “Companies need to find ways to develop talent differently and not in the same ways they did years ago,” says Barbara Keen, head of diversity, culture, and organization effectiveness at Novo Nordisk. “In the past, you would ask someone to spend five days getting trained. Today the response is, ‘Are you kidding me? I can’t take that much time.’ We are working hard to make sure our new professionals get the tools they need to be successful in the future. If a company doesn’t adjust or doesn’t see this as a priority, then future leaders are missing out on an opportunity to grow.”
Other talent specialists, particularly those of Generation X, similarly observe that there’s been a major culture shift in the way corporations approach young talent. They see a marked difference between their own experience entering the workforce fifteen years ago and that of Millennials entering today. “There’s no training, no management development,” one HR executive told us. “When I was starting out in the workforce, you knew that they cared about you and that they wanted you to learn. Now, I look around and think, ‘Where is the onboarding? Why is no one training these kids?’”
Why, indeed?
The Case against Millennials
So much research and news coverage have been devoted to the Millennial demographic that it’s easy to imagine we know all there is to know about this cohort. In the course of doing this research, we heard talent specialists, business leaders, and Millennials themselves make a host of assertions. Millennials, we were told, have very different priorities than previous generations. Determined to find meaning and purpose in their careers, they are more interested in advancing a global cause than committing themselves to a global corporation. Hungry for recognition, they’d rather build their personal brands than those of their employers. Confident of their worth, or intent on starting up their own companies, they’re focused on boosting their own compensation rather than contributing to their companies’ bottom lines.
Millennials are thought to be in it for “me me me”—and when companies fail to meet their unrealistic expectations, the story goes, they’re out the door in a flash.17
Research plays to these themes, reinforcing stereotypes. Jean Twenge’s landmark book, Generation Me, helped give rise to the notion that Millennials are entitled, narcissistic, and overconfident (“Generation Me has never known a world that put duty before self, and believes that the needs of the individual should come first,” she writes). The cover of Twenge’s book, splashed with an image of a young woman’s tattooed midriff adorned with a belly button piercing, rather nicely makes her point that Millennials can’t see beyond their own navels.18 Following the trail that Twenge blazed, an army of publications have succeeded in branding Millennials as the needy “problem children” of the corporate workforce, constantly angling for a trophy, a promotion, or a raise; many of the studies that have attempted to bust these myths have, in effect, only served to reinforce them.19
Research diving into subsets of the Millennial cohort hardly bring greater clarity to the portrait. Millennial women, for example, have been the focus of several large-scale studies in recent years—yet the picture painted of young women in the workplace is fuzzy. Are Millennial women finally closing the gender and wage gap? Or are they kicking feminism to the curb and leaning out, rather than in? Consensus is absent among relevant studies.20 While the very few studies looking at Millennials of color tend to agree that the Millennial generation is far from “post-racial,” most research serves to reinforce existing stereotypes: diverse Millennials are seen as highly qualified and tech-savvy employees vested in entrepreneurship, not corporate success.21 As for economic and micro-generational differences within the Millennial generation (such as Millennials from low-income backgrounds, or Millennials over the age of thirty), research is next to nonexistent.
One Foot out the Door
The danger of all these stereotypes is that they tend to coalesce, for talent specialists, into one big takeaway: Millennials are a looming flight risk.
In a recent survey of HR professionals, just one out of every one hundred said that Millennials are loyal to their employers.22 The other ninety-nine fully believe that Millennials are “job hoppers,” unwilling to commit to their employers for more than a few years.23 The global talent head of a multinational consultancy told us that giving Millennials what they want isn’t going to make them any more loyal. “Can you get these kids to stay?” she challenged. “We cross-train our Millennials, to keep it interesting for them. But we hesitate to send them off to far-flung places for two years, because they won’t stay with us for two years. We’re not going to see the payback. Their next employer will.” As another talent specialist clarified, by way of explaining why she wasn’t allocating any budget to Millennials’ training or development, “Our job is to give back money to our shareholders. We’re not a charity.”
In short, HR professionals recognize Millennials as their next workforce, but see no reason to groom them for leadership until they start acting, sounding, and looking like previous generations.
That’s a mistake with profound implications, as we’ll endeavor to show in Part Two. Drawing on two nationally representative surveys—our US survey of 3,298 college-educated men and women working full-time in white-collar professions in the US, and our multimarket survey of 11,936 college-educated men and women working full-time in seven critical markets (Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and the UK)—in addition to over sixty interviews and several focus groups, we unpack the needs and wants of the Millennial generation. We uncover not only the unparalleled diversity of this generation, but also the tremendous investment opportunity they represent for employers across industry sectors and around the globe.
But first: let’s see just how flighty Millennials in the US really are.
* Indicates name change to ensure source’s anonymity, here and throughout the text.
2
Who is Flighty?
Do Millennials have one foot out the door? This was an assumption we elected to test. We surveyed 765 college-educated men and women, born between 1982 and 1994, working full-time in white-collar professions in the US. And we indeed uncovered a high incidence of flight risk.
But not among all Millennials. We had a hunch that socioeconomics matter—something for which we hadn’t tested in our original survey. So we re-fielded to a subset of our original sample. Our hypothesis bore out.
It turns out that, in our nationally representative sample, Millennials who have a financial safety net—those who have families that could support them indefinitely, were they to quit or
