Generation Y and their Involvement in Work

Sergiu Lucian Raiu

doi:10.18662/lumenss/9.1/34

Abstract

This article presents the characteristics of Generation Y who are also referred to as Millennials in literature. It’s aim is to find out whether some of the general characteristics belong to young people in Romania, in the case of those who were born during the last years of Generation Y period. On the basis of a longitudinal sociological study where we have looked at the transition to maturity of 3509 high school students during a period of 8 years through a three waves research: when they were in the final high school years (12th and 13th grade), two years and 8 years after graduating from high school, we describe here the experience, perceptions and visions over workplaces and future career. 854 Generation Y young adults from Romania have responded to an online questionnaire during the three waves of the study.

Highlights

Organizations are facing a problem that they have never been confronted with before, because at the present time there are four different generations in the workplace: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and the youngest of all, Generation Z; each one of them having different values, ambitions and work styles
Generation Y entered the labour market in large numbers for more than a decade ago and since they have required new rules in the workplaces changing almost radically the work world, but the results presented in this article refer to the characteristics and the behaviour of a sample of Generation Y Romanian young people born between 1994-1995 and who entered recently the labour market
Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 is considered to be part of Generation Y and anyone born from 1997 on takes part from the new generation called Generation Z. in this article we referred to the youngest Romanian Generation Y members, born in 1994-1995, high school class of 2012 whose path we observed towards adulthood for a period of 8 years

Summary

Introduction

Organizations are facing a problem that they have never been confronted with before, because at the present time there are four different generations in the workplace: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and the youngest of all, Generation Z; each one of them having different values, ambitions and work styles. Other researchers point out that Generation Y are all the people born after 1980 (Ball & Gotsill, 2010) or between 1981 and 1994 (Seemiller & Grace, 2019) or between 1981 and 2000 (DelCampo, 2011). A largely accepted generational model belonging to the Pew Research Center subsume in Generation Y people born between 1981 and 1996 who are aged between 24 and 39 years old. Some experts remark that this generation is bigger than the Baby Boomers Generation, in the USA being more than 71,2 million people, the greatest living adults generation so far (Pew Research Center, 2019). In Romania, there are 4.051.920 people belonging to the Generation Y, that is people between 24-39 years old, representing 20,87% of the total population (NSI, 2020a). 35,26% of the total Romanian workforce are people belonging to the Generation Y (NSI, 2020b)

Methods

Results

Conclusion