Now that Millennials make up approximately 40% of employees worldwide, many business owners have had to make a priority of meeting Millennials’ needs and aligning their success with the company’s. Fortunately, doing that for Millennials succeeds in doing it for most employees. That’s because as a group, they entered the workforce over the course of the recession, which for them was an influential experience. As a collective group they shared this experience with everyone else, the lessons they learned, and what they wanted as a response to it, which can be applied to the wider workforce.

• 25% of Millennials say their top career goal is to “Make a positive impact on my organisation” (compared to 21% of GenX and 23% of Baby Boomers) (IBM)
• 71% of Millennials are actively seeking a new job, compared to 44% of Baby Boomers (ICIMS)
• 42% of millennials expect to change jobs at least every 1-3 years (Jobvite)

Millennials may be the most studied generation in history. Research shows they put an emphasis on corporate social responsibility, have a huge respect for the environment, place higher worth on acquiring experiences than material things, and connect around shared interests. In short, they want to be engaged by what they do and smart business owners will harness their sense of purpose or risk losing them as employees to more focussed Employers.

Millennials bring a willingness and intensity to their employers that needs to be engaged immediately and handled properly. They require a deeper understanding of the company they work for than previous generations did, and they want their role aligned to their company’s success. They expect to work for an agile Employer who makes the best use of the skills they have and gives them the opportunity to develop new ones as the market and the economy continues to evolve. They expect their Employer to judge them based upon measured results, and they expect opportunities for advancement to come quickly and for promotions to be based on merit alone. Employers still evaluating people on time-and-attendance and promoting them according to their seniority simply can’t compete.

Over the course of their lives, Millennials have witnessed technology developing more rapidly than it ever has in history. To them, this is normal, and so they have no expectation that their job, their company, or even the part of the economy where they sit will remain the same for very long.

In the United States, the average 29 year old employee has already had seven jobs! Most business owners cringe at that statistic, because it is expensive to recruit, train, and then lose an employee. To Employers, that Millennial churn represents an enormous cost to the business that person cycled through. The solution is management. It’s constructive to think of each of those jobs as a career development stepping-stone for the employee. Employers that actively encourage career development within their businesses stand to retain the best people and to create a culture where they can flourish. Millennials are adaptable, creative and enjoy contributing ideas in a high-energy work environment.

Aligning a Millennial’s ambitions with business goals puts an Employer in a position to create great employees. That alignment harnesses their energy, their willingness to contribute, and their commitment to personal development. If a business owner can accomplish this for a Millennial, then they accomplish it for employees of all ages.