Name too long
A workshop about how to work with Gen Y
My name is Tian
I was born in 1987 so I’m a qualified Gen-Y. Gen-Y is sometimes defined as people born between 1980 and 1995, so I sit somewhere in the middle band of the age spread of my generation
The reason I’m here today is because I’m a director and former president of Student Entrepreneurs, which I co-founded in 2007. It’s a student-run organisation aim to create and cultivate communities of entrepreneurship in Australian universities.
[fast forward] Today, 1800 members, 4 programs a year, thousands of students have participated in our events and competitions, and what I’m most proud of was that 14 student-run startups have been born direct or indirect as results of this organisation. Seeing these students put in everything they had to start their own businesses and pursuing their own dreams was something that gave me immense satisfaction.
While I’d love to claim all the credit, in reality we couldn’t have done all this without the support of other organisation, the corporate and the government. In this session I’d like to share with you how we have worked with these organisations, especially the government, and for you as knowledge city builders, what you need to do to foster organisations run by young people like student entrepreneurs in your own cities.
So How I am going to approach this issue is that I think there are three dimensions working with Gen-Y
How can knowledge city builders tap into the Gen Y talent pool, access their ideas and manpower
How to support Gen Y project
How to collaborate with Gen Y to produce desirable and tangible results for your city, and at the same time, fulfill your organization's agendas
But before we jump ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back and ask this question: why
I assume everybody here today in this workshop already see the benefit of working with Gen Y, so it’s not my job to convince you.
But I’d like to just give my two cents, from a Gen Y’s perspective, what can we contribute
1. Inevitable - Today half of Gen-Y have already entered the workforce, which represents about 10% of today’s total workforce
In the next few years as more Gen-Y’s graduate from university
So the best approach is to figure out how to work with Gen-Ys early, and believe or not we are eager to work with you as well. I myself is always looking for people who are older than me, have more experience in the industry, who I can work for or work with in exchange of experience and knowledge – and that’s very key in the development of knowledge city, we are talking about knowledge transfer from generation to generation
2. more time, mobility, can afford to be a bit adventurous and take the risk to do something outside of ordinary
Minimum family commitment, less social pressure etc
And risk taking is crucial for innovation and entrepreneurialism
3. We have flaws
Too many bad press about how Gen Ys are irresponsible, politically inactive, wasting time on facebook.
It’s not a Gen Y issue, it’s a societal issue. If you have read Malcom Gladwell’s Outlier, you would know we are the product of our environment. Let’s work together to resolve them –
Wesa Chau – Australian Federation for International Students - to resolve issues that’s happening to the international student population in our city
Filip -
comes back to the theme of this workshop – create better knowledge cities through collaboration for future generations.
Go back to the three dimension of working with Gen Y
How can knowledge city builders tap into the Gen Y talent pool, access their ideas and manpower
To answer this question, we want to know – what tick’s the Gen Y’s mind
We at Student Entrepreneurs have actually been thinking about this for a long time.
Just because we are Gen Ys doesn’t mean we understand ourselves, and since our goal was to create a community of entrepreneurs
We are constantly looking for ways and experimenting different approaches to engage with the students, and the answer lies within this concept of…
Notion of “Trophy kids” – a concept developed by Ron Alsop
Gen Y’s inherent competitiveness and enjoyment of winning, this happens because again this is a product of their social and economic environment which we grew up, but that’s a whole new area of discussion so I won’t elaborate here.
Usually this concept is used in a bad context, but really this captures this mentality of gen-y, and want for challenges and competitions. So to answer our earlier question, what ticks their mind
Running competitions is by far the most successful way of engaging with the students.
This is what really ticks the Gen Y’s mind – it’s challenging, it’s risky, and there’s an incentive at the end
This is the best way to engage with Gen Y, and you actually have a chance to see them at work, what each one of them are capable to produce,
There are different ways to run competitions, and we have identified two types of them that are most relevant
Depends on the purpose/goal
Napkin Competition – concept of business idea on the back of a napkin. All the students had to do was to
write 1-200 words to describe one of the random crazy business ideas they have, and that qualifies as an entry.
The competition is designed to have a very low barrier to entry, so that anybody, anybody could participate.
Oresund Entrepreneurship Academy
Run this competition at the start of a semester – getting everybody’s attention
Startup Camp, bring 30 students together to start their own businesses within the course of one weekend.
Not a competition but Exclusivity and peer pressure makes the program competitive
It’s an exhilarating experience, but obviously not for the faint-hearted
Two ways of to engage students
Introducing something new, want to create a hype, a momentum
On the other hand if you are looking for The One…
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
To run their projects, to contribute to the society / economy
Gen-Ys are poor, it’s a fact, because we are young, especially for those of us who isn’t working, or has just started their careers.
Don’t be scare, we are not here to steal all your money
Gen-Ys are cheap to support – they don’t have family to support, not so much social pressure, they can accept a minimal lifestyle.
In order to support their projects, all they need is
7 events over the course of two years
Once you hit that number, exponential growth
My suggestion to the money issue is for city officials and corporates to set up small grants or sponsorships
In reality you don’t need to provide the whole $5000. Partially and incrementally
In hindsight $5000 was actually a very big amount. If I’m to do it all over again, I’ll be able able to
Encourage you to set up small grant schemes for Gen-Ys who are really passionate about certain issues and certain interests (come back later when we talk about collaboration, about how to set them up to fulfill your own organisation’s agenda, such as building knowledge cities)
Do what they feel truly passionate about
Group them together, both come from mostly age
A champion with the experience and the network, but most importantly share the passion we have.
As my colleague Adrian would know we are constantly looking for champions everywhere, at the Academic level, the business level, the government level, and even within the students.
Without these champions we couldn’t go anywhere
A good example would be our club’s biggest champion and longest supportor…
General Manager of Graduate School of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne.
Someone high up, who shares our passion and is willing to look after us, open doors within the university.
We were officially affiliated with the faculty, access to facilities, we start having small sponsorship from the uni.
And even more importantly, Brooke spent a lot of time mentoring us, the first president, the second president, the third and so on. We’ve all sat in her office, ask her for advices for the difficulties we were facing (leadership, management). Her contribution was absolutely crucial
The question for you to think about is, is there somebody in your city who could be the champion of the youth? To lead a collaboration initiative with the Gen-Y
If not, what do you need to do to find a person like that
When I say collaborate I really mean a Win-Win for….
For both the Gen-Ys and your own agenda
Achieve your agenda, what is good for our society, while supporting young people, their passion and make sure they have a good time
Which has formed a partnership a year ago
A lot of overlap in what we are both trying to achieve
Which has formed a partnership a year ago
Literally swap them around
And that’s what I call win-win, both organisations are able to leverage on the other’s strengths to cover its weaknesses and deliver tangible results and achieve their goals.
OKC didn’t have a lot of money, token amount, but logo gave credibitlity
Win-win is the ultimate goal of collaboration with Gen Y
Wrap it all up in a package, for your later discussion, or take back to your home country and apply the tools and create a vibrant gen Y community
Introducing something new, want to create a hype, a momentum
On the other hand if you are looking for The One…
Introducing something new, want to create a hype, a momentum
On the other hand if you are looking for The One…
Introducing something new, want to create a hype, a momentum
On the other hand if you are looking for The One…
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
When you already know what you want to achieve, already engaged, filtering process
You don’t have to run them yourself
Do what they feel truly passionate about
That’s all, thank you very much for your attention.
That’s my email there if you’d like to get in touch and further this conversation.
I’ll now pass it onto Dr. Edna Pasher