Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic generation following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
The Millennials seem to be making a lot of people worried. With blog postings like “I am a millennial accountant, and I Hate Accounting” just one of many things you can discover about the millennials if you look hard enough. And that blog coming from an accountant working for the firm that won the Australian Accounting Award for Innovation.
Compared to the generation before them (Generation X) who have sometimes been known as stoic, silent, persistent, secure, and reliable, the Generation Y is leaving a lot of people scratching their heads, and at the same time a slough of research is being done and some by key accounting firms and other large companies such as IBM.
CEB confirmed that while some assumptions are true, there are some myths. Yes, they expect to be paid more and promoted faster. Yes they are more likely to leave their jobs (>51% versus 37% Gen X, versus 18% Baby Boomers), and yes they want more career development opportunities. As the CEB report says, it’s not that millennials want to organization hop, they just want to experience the hop!
The PwC’s NextGen report had 40,000 responses and was considered the largest global generational study every conducted. This report was prepared after PwC began to notice that the youngest generation of professionals were leaving PwC in growing numbers after just a few years, and a significant majority of them appeared to lack interest in the traditional professional services career path. The report commented that 64% of Millennials would like to occasionally work from home, and 66% of Millennials would like to shift their work hours, while 71% of PwC Millennials employees said that their work demands interfere with their personal lives.
Deloitte interviewed 7,700 millennials in 29 countries and came up with the conclusion that millennials in general express little loyalty to their current employers and many are planning near-term exits. 44% of Millennials would if given a choice leave their current employer within 2 years, with that figure rising to 61% leaving by 2020 in the developed markets leaving the conclusion that Millennials already have one foot out the door.
Deloitte further went on to note that Millennials in emerging markets are the least loyal to their current organizations with for example 64% of Millennials in the Philippines expecting to leave their current firm in the next five years.
As more Australian accounting firms turn to offshore resources for their compliance resourcing requirements, it will be interesting to see the impact on the fixed resource offshore model given the greater change of organization hopping by Millennials working in emerging markets.
