The iPod Workforce

THEY want to be paid at least $2,500 a month and be praised at work, but won’t skip their evening gym sessions to work overtime.

They roll into the office with their iPods and mini-skirts around noon – and yet expect to be CEO by the end of the week.

But the shocker is: Many professionals – the young blood entering the workforce – whom my paper spoke to actually agreed with this depiction of themselves. Four local recruitment firms also affirmed these trends among new hires.

A recent episode of American news programme 60 Minutes zeroed in on those born after 1980, who are known as the Millennial Generation – or the iPod
Generation.

Its findings were culled from interviews with employers, young employees and recruitment experts in the US.

The show found that Millennial Generation employees have no company loyalty and think that anyone over 30 is old, redundant and should be retired.

Mr Josh Goh of recruitment firm GMP Group felt that the same attitude prevails among the under-30s here who have not gone through a recession.

Said the corporate services manager: “Due to the current talent shortage, employers are telling recruits what the company can do for them, rather than ask what they can do for it.”

Assistant project manager Mr Heng Tee Jin, 24, is one such Millennial Generation employee. While he agreed that “young employees are often seen as lazy or lacking in ambition”, he said he has also witnessed peers who are “equally hungry for success”.

“It boils down to the individual”, he added.

This was a MyPaper article that I copied out. I think it was published last month.

This is the issue that has been talked about ever since I was young. This is what you get when you have a parent who worked his way out of poverty, and never tires of reminding you of what it’s all about.

It is infectious enough to be scary. I have seen people, who after marrying one of my family members, start having more of a work ethic than they did before. And it’s all that nagging, that consistent competition and one-upmanship that goes around.

Some of my aunts have asked me, well the 3 eldest cousins have degrees from nice universities in the US. (She means myself, my sister and my cousin). And you have the younger one who gets pressured because she can’t do the same. They ask me, do you feel bad about giving pressure to your youngsters?

I said that I didn’t know. Yes, I received a lot of help when I was young in my studies. Not from tuition, not from asking help from my teachers. My parents did give me a good hard push when I was very young and that definitely helped. Also I never had to worry about anything else other than studying, and that helped. The rest was all down to my talent and hard work. So I said I just did what I did without thinking too hard about how people who are going to follow after me are going to take it.

But I can be quite offensive about doing well. I think that when I did well in school I pissed my sister off so much that she became really competitive and did even better than me in school.

When I think about it, their complaints that I was putting pressure on my younger cousin did not make sense. One of them was a successful fund manager, really raking it in. The other did not really fit the conventional Singaporean notion of success but she is a good enough cook that we know that she will succeed if she wants to go into business. Then there’s my father, former head boy, top student, climbed up the corporate ladder. Their youngest sister married a successful businessman. I think it is completely not fair for them to complain about me giving the youngsters pressure.

We’ll keep on giving youngsters pressure and taking pressure, I guess. That is the system. We’ve usually had corporal punishment in my family. I didn’t like getting beaten the shit out of when I screwed up but I will do it to my kids because this is family tradition. My grandmother beat the shit out of my father, my father beat the shit out of me, and I will beat the shit out of my kids when they screw up.

So when I see that article about what youngsters are like in their work, I don’t feel particularly proud to be associated with that generation of assholes. You do not need to be from a poor background to have that extra drive and passion. Bill Gates was born upper middle class. In a perverse way, even though Paris Hilton was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, you need a certain amount of drive to keep your name constantly in the tabloids without having any artistic talent that people normally need to end up there in the first place.

I wish my generation of people were not like that. I wish they were humble down to earth folk who didn’t place such emphasis on hedonism and shit like that.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the model employee because I’m not. But I still think there has to be some minimum standard for everybody, and people should get their priorities in life right.

In the business world, people usually consider it a success if all your customers are spoilt and pampered assholes who say me me me I I I, vacuous enough to part with their cash at every given opportunity, seeking fleeting pleasures, not giving a fucking thought about how they are contributing to the betterment of society and that is completely fucked up.