Kids today: Don't fear the Millennials at work

We've been told today's youngsters will create havoc when they enter the workplace. After working in schools, Richard Leyland tells a different story.

I'm sure you've heard the familiar scare story about the next generation in the workplace, a hazily defined group of teens and pre-teens often called 'Millennials'.

They are disloyal technology-literate narcissists and you better get with it, granddad, or they'll never do you the great service of working for you, during that brief spell between university and their taking over the world.

After hundreds of articles (some of which I'm shamefacedly responsible for) and several books along these lines, the trend reached its high-water mark recently when Morgan Stanley published the musings of a 15-year-old intern. In the report, the intern describes how young people use media. In short: Twitter is for oldies, along with newspapers, wires and paying for stuff.

The Morgan Stanley report has now triggered a backlash but beyond the sensationalism and half-truths, what's the reality?

After working in schools and speaking to real live young people, I couldn't find any of these workplace time bombs.

This conclusion is based on a major research project I led about a year ago on how the Millennials will change the world of work, as well as a series of short films I made in which children explore their vision of a future digital Britain.

Before undertaking these projects, I'd written several pieces on young people's use of tech but I'd only ever spoken to teachers and other grown-ups. It was refreshing and enlightening to go into some London schools and youth groups and actually talk to children.

While it's tempting to construct an entire 'Theory of the Millennial' from what I saw and heard, I'll limit myself to reporting where my findings go against established thinking - and identify what I believe to be four myths.

Myth 1: The next generation's attachment to social networks and being heard will soon invert the old ideas about hierarchies at work. The tail will wag the dog.

I could find no such inclination among the children I met. Instead they tended to speak about the importance of learning from more senior mentors. Nor could I find children refusing to accept authority. The children I met were generally polite and attentive at school. They may be little dictators at home but then I wasn't all that nice to live with at 15 either.

Myth 2: Millennials are egotistical 'trophy kids', cosseted by their parents and demanding constant praise.

I found the contrary. I ran several workshops with young teenagers in which we discussed their ambitions for the future. Perhaps it was simply their Britishness but their ambitions were modest and their self-esteem low. Several times I wanted to shout, "But you're young! You can do anything!"

Myth 3: When it comes to what motivates them at work, received wisdom is that Millennials value softer measures such as flexibility, creative potential, social responsibility, gadgets and perks over the banality of salary.

Not the children I met. I asked several groups of primary and secondary school children what their motivation for work will be, and was invariably told "the money". In one case I facilitated a discussion on what other motivators may be relevant, and found three-quarters still wanted to see the colour of our money.

Myth 4: Digital immersion has given our Millennials the attention span of a distracted goldfish.

Not in my experience. When I helped to establish an experimental classroom of the future in a West London secondary school, one of the most compelling observations was that children's concentration levels and engagement with the lesson are improved when lessons are over a longer period. The breathing space of half-day lessons saw groups of children absolutely lost in the task in hand.

Of course I'm piling anecdote onto anecdote here, and the plural of anecdote is certainly not data. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that we need to calm down a little.

To label the next generation as a breed apart may appeal to our sense of the dramatic but there's not much to justify it.

Our Millennial friends are indeed 'digital natives' but if they're behaving differently to previous generations it's because they're immersed in the digital world that we grown-ups have created. Judgemental labels tend to be unhelpful, erroneous or both.

Richard Leyland is a futurist and writer, with a particular focus on the future of work. He writes at www.richardleyland.com or follow him on Twitter @leylandrichard