Young professionals are today the most energetic people in an organisation and their energy is derived from wanting to share their knowledge as well as learning as much as they can.
What is happening in the world today is that the energy is being suppressed in some organisations by stale bosses who are not used to this kind of energy and don’t really understand what this young professional is about. This will then cause the young professionals to either hop jobs or end up being stale and not have the same energy that they had originally.
So what to do if you are a young professional is a “stale environment” well the first step would be to think about what it is that you want? Very often we are very quick to point out things that are going wrong or not happening yet we haven’t defined what we want. Secondly keep the energy alive by constantly learning in the job that you are doing focus on what you are doing right and build up on that as opposed to looking at things that are not working. And lastly don’t put yourself down or think that you are not supposed to add value because you have “alot to learn”, be part of the team and add value from day one (what possibly could you be waiting for?)
For the organisation to make this free working environment for the young professionals they will have to find out what the strengths of that young professional are and then try and work from those in order to enable the person to excel in their job. The organisations need to connect with the young professional from a personal perspective.
Niel, Eefje, Mandy, Elsona. Frauke and myself are all very interested in the topic of young professionals. We all want to know if there are organisations that assist young people to flourish, we are all very interested in the transition from Tertiary to working and what kind of learning process takes place in that transition. We wondering why young people “job hop” or end up with less energy that they had when they started a new job. We are finding differences in South Africa, Netherlands and Belgium and how we can collaborate our ideas and see what happens.
Our first process was interviewing each other and then we can take it from there. I am personally very excited by some of the insights that we have already and I am looking forward to what we can do together with the information.