The kids are all right

Andy Paluch

It seems like every generation throughout history must have felt that their children’s generation was a bit lazy and didn’t know how to put in a hard day’s work. Over the past year, I have been working closely with colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada to help find innovative ways to get young people interested in careers in horticulture and landscape management. Through this work, I’ve had the privilege to talk to a lot of really smart people in the academic world, as well as the contractors, growers, suppliers and manufacturers who make up the industry and all of whom are grappling with this issue.

Anyone who has spent much time trying to figure out how to recruit more qualified people into the green industry has surely had at least a dozen conversations that all come around to more or less the same point: “Kids nowadays just don’t want to work.”

While there may be a degree of truth to this explanation, unfortunately it is a dead end in terms of actually solving the problem. No doubt, every generation has its fair share of lazy people who expect to get something for nothing, and the current generation of young people is no different. This generation, commonly referred to as Generation Y or the Millennials, is made up of people born somewhere between 1980 and the early 2000s. A few rotten apples.

A wise man once told me that any time you start making general statements about a very large group of people, you are bound to get more wrong than you get right.

Each generation grows up very differently than their parents did, and this seems to lead to the belief that the younger generation is flawed in some way. If you’re a Baby Boomer who is worried about what the world will look like when it belongs to the Millennials, just remember what your parents thought when you were growing your hair long and listening to 8-tracks of The Who and Led Zeppelin.

Moving past this assumption that there is something wrong with young people frames the problem of recruitment in a way that we can actually start talking about solutions. As a 28-year-old who spends most of my time working with college students and young people, I’d like to share an observation about people in my generation that has some interesting implications for any company in the green industry that is trying to improve its approach to recruiting more motivated and hard-working young people.

Millennials want jobs that allow them to make an impact. In fact, according to a study done by Rutgers University, “65 percent of university students expect to be able to make some positive social or environmental difference through their work.” Thanks to technology, we are the most connected, networked and aware generation in history. Whether we are all getting accurate information about what is going on in the world is beside the point. What matters is that we know and care about the problems that are presented to us through the technology that we use nearly every minute of the day. As a result, most young people today are looking for a career where we can make more than a good living; we want to make a difference.

Speak their language. Like in the words of the song written by the great Pete Townshend of The Who, “The Kids Are Alright.” They are just motivated by different things than their parents were. Don’t talk about the job, talk about the impact that they can make through the job. Don’t start with what they’ll do and how much they’ll make, start with why the work is important.

Tell them about what your company believes in, the purpose or passion that defines your culture and how they have the opportunity to be an important part of that collective vision. A lot of companies struggle to communicate their deeper purpose to both potential customers and potential employees because they simply don’t know what it is. If you are the owner of a company or the head of an HR department and you don’t know why the work you do is important, stop and figure that out before you try to inspire a single other person to join your team.

Andy Paluch works for JP Horizons as the network coordinator of the Come Alive Outside initiative.