Millenials, Entitlement, and Job Hopping

by David Stiennon

Young folks in their early twenties trying to dig their way into the job market often experience their first real-life Catch-22.

If you scan any list of job postings, you will realize that the vast majority of advertised jobs require experience. Even nominally entry level jobs will still ask for 1 or 2 years experience. The problem is, you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience.

Like most apparent Catch-22's, it appears unsolvable when viewed as an abstract puzzle, but real life is a little more complicated. I think for most people, the way around involves several job hops. You take a job which is majority grunt work, but gives the opportunity to work on something interesting maybe 20% of the time. After a year, you can claim 1 year's experience on your resume doing the interesting part, and use that to interview for jobs where that's your main duty. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Let's see an example.

Kristen graduated from college with an Anthropology degree in 2009. All of the slim pickings of entry level corporate jobs were going to the A students, and Kristen, like half of her class, has a below-average GPA. So, to make ends meet, Kristen takes the only job she can find - waiting tables. BUT, after a year waiting tables, and doing the occasional shift as Maitre d` on understaffed nights, she is able to spin up a resume which claims enough experience to nab interviews and eventually a job offer as a receptionist at a law firm. Of course, she quickly finds that the reason she was able to get the offer with minimal experience was because the law firm has a LOT of turnover among their support staff. It's home to a dysfunctional group of attorneys who enjoy yelling at people, and the pay is well below market. After 7 or 8 months on this job, Kristen is fed up, but now she has "Close to a year" of experience as a receptionist on her resume, and she is able to turn that into a receptionist job at a much more professional organization. It's a small company, so she ends up helping with coordinating schedules and managing the logistics and paperwork which keep an office running, including a lot of the paperwork for new hires. After close to two years, she writes a resume where she claims a title of "Office Manager" rather than receptionist, and "2 years experience performing human resources tasks". It's maybe stretching the truth a little, but she's able to sell it convincingly enough that she lands a junior position in the the Human Resources department of large company, a position which required "1-3 years of HR experience".

I've read a fair amount of commentary calling young folks following this kind of career trajectory "entitled" or "disloyal". I think that reflects a deep misunderstanding of why people job hop like this.

What appears to be disloyalty from Kristen is self-preservation. Note that only after going through 4 jobs in less than 4 years was Kristen able to work her way into the kind of white-collar job she had hoped to earn with her college degree. If she had stayed with any of those organizations for the long run, in 10 years she would likely still be doing the same job, with annual raises which barely keep pace with inflation. If the company cannot be relied upon to train her for new jobs or to provide a path for advancement, her only viable career moves are diagonal. This leads to an paradoxical situation: While nominally the companies she is working for provide no training and simply hire people who already have the skills they need, the most valuable asset of any job she takes is the skillset she learns on the job. As long as she is learning, she is growing in her career, and as soon as she stops learning, she needs to either find a new job or stagnate.

Kristen's path is in keeping with the ideal of the American Dream, of starting at the bottom and making her way up through hard work and ambition. In fact, it reflects LESS of a sense of entitlement than the old fashioned American Dream. She expects that she is entitled to nothing from her employer beyond the month's paycheck. She does not assume that exceptional performance will automatically earn her promotions, training, increased responsibility, or even job security.

It is understandable that many companies became this way in the down economy. I think managers got into the habit of believing they have no resources to spare on training or bringing people up to speed; That they needed to hire people who could be productive right away. This attitude leads to a certain kind of job posting (Granted, I think it is unusually bad in the software industry, but I'm sure you can find this kind of thing in other fields):

Wanted:  Software Engineer
Requirements: 
	Visual Basic.net (version 4.0 or greater:  6+ years experience
	Visual Basic 6 : 2+ years experience
	Sql Server (2008 R2):  4 years experience
	Javascript: 3 years experience
	Jquery : 3 years experience
	nHiberate (Version 2 or greater):  2 years experience
	Telerik controls:  4 years
	Visual Source Safe: 3 years
	SSIS:  3 years
	Crystal Reports:  3 years
	Scrum:  3 years
	J2EE:  3 years
	MS Access:  3 years
    ....etc. etc. etc.....
Preferred:
	COBOL experience
	COM experience
	......

I think from the company's perspective, job posts like this are awfully tempting. Who wouldn't want the guy who is already knowledgeable about not just a few, but ALL of the tools you use for your business? But I think there's a key to preventing employees like Kristen from jumping ship after a year or two: Get rid of this kind of job posting. It sends a couple harmful messages to your employees:

  1. They cannot and should not learn new skills on the job. Most of the skills above don't take years of experience to master. With many of them you can go from zero to proficient inside of a few weeks, and most of the others can be picked up nearly as quickly by an experienced software engineer. The post sends an implied message that taking even a few weeks to ramp up on new tools is something the company considers unacceptable, which hints that learning and growth in this position is not encouraged.

  2. They will not be promoted: Promoting people involves placing them into new jobs in which they have only indirect experience. If the company's hiring policy reflects a belief that the only person who can be entrusted with a task is someone who already has years of experience doing it, then by definition they are not going to promote people

In addition, the perceived benefit of such posts is mostly illusory. The post is really asking for someone who is already doing the exact same job and has been for years. And that is the one person who is unlikely to apply, because he already has a job which is just as good. They might be able to get such a person if they recruit very smartly and offer an above-market salary. Much more likely, they will hire a candidate who has the requisite years experience, but is a little desperate for some reason. Or they will actually hire a less experienced candidate who is able to sell himself convincingly as having the requisite experience. Once that candidate arrives, he will grow until he actually has the skill set the original posting asked for, but once he has reached that, there is no more room for growth and he will need to leave.

If an opportunity to learn is the single most important aspect of a job to employees like Kristen, and the company desires to retain such employees, I think the solution is clear: Provide those opportunities for learning and growth. Be on the lookout for smart, dynamic people, and hire them for entry level jobs regardless of their experience. Rather than only hiring outsiders for senior-level positions, be open to growing and promoting internal people. Creating such an environment will, I believe, take away the incentive to job-hop.

(Header image courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/tek/4428002492)