Gen Y trying to figure out what to do next

Here's a bit of conversation between career-development coach Jeanine O'Donnell and one of her clients, a recent college graduate:

O'DONNELL: Who's the most successful person you know?

CLIENT: That would be my Uncle Bill. He owns a company.

O'DONNELL: Would you like to have his life?

CLIENT: Oh, God, NO!

The young man went on to describe how his uncle devoted himself to his business, resulting in a stunted private life. And coach O'Donnell went on to explain that she begins with each client by trying to put work into perspective as just one contributor to a successful life.

She and her clients are up against a powerful cult devoted to convincing us that work is all that matters -- a cult known as Management. (As Exhibit A, consider the truth underlying this joke: ``What's another word for `workaholic'? `Employee of the Year.' ")

What got me to thinking was O'Donnell's response to a column I wrote about young employees. She responded by saying, ``You're right: They know they don't want to be their parents. The problem is that they don't know what they do want to be." From my own conversations with my ``echo boom" or ``Gen Y" sons, they not only don't want to be me, they are certain that they don't want the conventional corporate jobs, the holders of which I've heard them mock as ``cubicle guys."

So where does this leave those in Gen Y? Even more bewildered than the rest of us. But rather than scold them, O'Donnell insisted that they have a claim on our compassion, for we are the ones who shaped them. She said: ``They aren't spoiled as much as `overincented.' Growing up, they were given incentives for every behavior their parents wanted to encourage. And so, they have no internal motivation. Then, when it comes time to choose a career, they are confronted with two realities: One, plenty of their contemporaries have college degrees like theirs, and two, thousands of career possibilities exist for them."

As for the latter, O'Donnell concluded that: ``It's like being set down in a grocery store and told to pick one food to eat. Oh, and pick carefully, because that's the only food you'll eat for the next few years."

One recent client, an outgoing frat boy, offered O'Donnell his pat answer to the inevitable what-are-your-plans-when-you-graduate question: ``I'll either go to grad school or law school, or get an MBA." She says of him, and those like him: ``They're stalling. They act tough and tell you that `I'll do it my way,' but they are looking over the ledge and scared that there's nothing down there. So, they're buying time. (Oh yes, I know all about that last part. My kids are buying time . . . using my credit card and paying retail.)

As for working together, it's easier to feel sympathy for Gen Y if we understand that it's not that they don't care; rather, they care desperately about coming across as not caring.

So what's the solution? That takes us back to where we started. O'Donnell's process is to get her young clients to work through their preferences for learning and working, then to match those up with possible careers in such a way that ``they find work that doesn't feel like work." She added: ``This is another way of saying that they find the internal motivation they -- and their parents -- didn't know they had. It's there, waiting for them to find it."

You can learn more about O'Donnell's coaching techniques at careerjuice.com (and for those midcareer, at bluekilowatt.com). In the meantime, I offer the parents of Gen Y a statement from Bruce Springsteen that is oddly comforting, allowing us to believe that we are the last to see the future of our children: ``When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar."

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.