In Novem­ber of 1975 Bill Gates dropped out of Har­vard to open a soft­ware busi­ness in Albu­querque with his friend Paul Allen. They called the busi­ness Micro-Soft.  In Jan­u­ary of 1977, Apple moved out of Steve Job’s garage and into offices on Stevens Creek Boule­vard in Cuper­tino, Cal­i­for­nia and began sell­ing per­sonal com­puter to the masses.  Some­where between those sem­i­nal events, the first of the so-called mil­len­nium or “Y” gen­er­a­tion was born.

The  Y gen­er­a­tion is the first gen­er­a­tion that has lived with per­sonal com­put­ers and the Inter­net its entire life. It is no coin­ci­dence that they are dri­ving today’s social tech­nol­ogy. The Y gen­er­a­tion was born with dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy.  Being dig­i­tally con­nected is part of their DNA.

In 1993, Riku Pihko­nen, an engi­neer­ing stu­dent at Nokia, sent the first SMS text mes­sage over a phone. The first of the Y gen­er­a­tion were reach­ing their mid teens.  Tex­ting became their way of stay­ing con­nected. Being reach­able became a gen­er­a­tional norm. By mid 2008, 75 bil­lion text mes­sages were sent every month in the United States.

Dig­i­tal net­work­ing moved from the phone to the Inter­net in 1997 when SixDegrees.com launched a site that allowed users to cre­ate pro­files, list their friends, and search their friend’s lists.  Today’s LinkedIn, Face­book, and Twit­ter are all descen­dents of SixDe­grees, dri­ven by a generation’s need to stay connected.

Today, the Y gen­er­a­tion is firmly entrenched in the work­force. By 2018 they will con­sti­tute half of the work­ing pop­u­la­tion. Their gen­er­a­tional val­ues are reflected in the social net­works they use.  As a gen­er­al­ity, they are:
•    Team ori­ented
•    Multi-taskers
•    Will­ing to share knowl­edge freely
•    More inter­ested in their pas­sions than in money
•    Have no inter­est in hierarchy

These char­ac­ter­is­tics, devel­oped in the socially flat world of the Inter­net, are dri­ving new com­mu­ni­ca­tion and prob­lem solv­ing mod­els. Social learn­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tive learn­ing, pro­fes­sional learn­ing net­works, are all buzz words that have made their way into the work­place with the Y gen­er­a­tion. 2010 will bring with it a vir­tual tsunami of orga­ni­za­tional change as busi­nesses con­nect their employ­ees, part­ners, dis­trib­uters, and customers.

The Y gen­er­a­tion dis­cov­ered some­thing. We do make bet­ter deci­sions if we stay con­nected and work together. They also know that we, as indi­vid­u­als, want to con­tribute and be heard – regard­less of our generation.