A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald discussed what generation Y kids want in the workplace, and how they get what they want. As part of the first cohort of this generation, born from 1980 to 1994, to enter the architectural profession, I thought I could translate what this might mean for our own field.
The article points to certain values that mark us out from those in the workforce above us: “Generation Y want respect, flexibility and challenges at work. And if they don’t get them, they’re leaving.” “Gen Y want immediate and fast ... progression and, or at least, opportunity to develop their skills.” “Generation Y have a reputation for little company loyalty and poor job commitment, but this is more a desire for variety, challenge, and change.”
In the eight years of my own career, made possible by UTS’ part time study program, I can attest to having worked in as many offices, from sleepy suburban six-man firms, to the largest commercial practice in France, on houses, schools and churches, office towers and federal prisons. Amongst my classmates, one left an urban planning office to work as a builder’s labourer before returning to a residential practice, another found time to develop a property portfolio for herself, a third paused his studies to build childcare centres in Vietnam.
There is a drive amongst my peers to come at life from all fronts, to develop ourselves professionally by testing many life paths in rapid succession. This is a paradox in a slow-moving field such as architecture, where the simplest projects take five years to come to term, and where experience is traditionally built by following them along the whole winding road. On one hand, it is worrying for employers to see us treat our careers with such impatience. On the other, when we see architects working proudly into their seventies and eighties, we feel we can afford not to settle down too hastily.
This relentless agitation has provoked all kinds of responses from those with the thankless task of managing us. One boss decided to throw me into the deep end of contract administration, tendering processes and cost planning, and occasionally, had the grace to fish me out again without a word of criticism. Some have seen fit to leave me alone for months on end, trusting that my own curiosity and initiative will enable me to piece together everything I need to know to complete a set of documents. These social experiments have created some very tense moments in a few offices, but I’ve come to appreciate the generosity of those managers who’ve attempted them.
Others have tried to challenge me, instructing me to take the initiative to defend my ideas, and then looking bewildered as I’ve walked out the door; and it is this behaviour so typical of my generation that might most need explaining.
Usually it is the feeling that we are really being asked to defend our enthusiasm against a senior figure's indifference to our interests that makes us turn. In these moments, managers need to realise that the generation Y employee is assessing their performance as a leader perhaps even more so than they are testing him or her. The employee is assessing their bosses on two grounds. The first is their usefulness as an employer – how much are you willing to offer me what I want to experience? This is partly the attitude of the young professional as consumer, treating each job as a "life experience" product and seeking the best value for "money". The second is the manager’s own level of aspiration – how much do you strive for architecturally yourself? It is those managers that seem uncommitted to my own development, or uncommitted to architectural production, that I’ve tended to bid farewell to.
Peter Sheahan, writing the book Generation Y, confirms these sentiments, that we “have a desire to make some kind of a contribution, to feel like whatever work they’re engaging in today is making some kind of impact on the business, but even better, that the business is making some kind of positive impact on the world.”
Young architects move into the profession expecting that any office they enter will share their urge for experimentation, and judge harshly, and silently, any boss that fails to deliver. This is vital for graduates fresh from the conceptual environment of university, and nears religious zealotry for those such as myself who worked and studied concurrently. It is as disorienting to such students, as it is frustrating for our bosses, for us to attend lectures on Louis Kahn or Peter Zumthor in the morning, then to sit down to cadmonkey in the afternoon and be told to confine our thoughts to commercial realities.
Am I starting to sound about as petulant as the rest of my peers? The interesting question to me is not whether we’ll eventually pull our heads in, but how we might change the profession in the coming decades by refusing to do so.
Will our energy cause an upswell of avant-gardism in the coming years? Will our impatience infect the industry with decades of undercooked architecture? Such conclusions would be too simple.
Better to recognise that our restlessness comes also from a structural shift in society’s values, and that the values of my generation, across every profession in society, are what will shape the next forty years of our nation’s history.
We are the first generation to take the seriousness of ecological problems for granted. We are the first children of the digital era, and the first not to care about the damage it has done to our traditional senses of social and public identity. We are more spiritual and emotional than our seniors, and less pragmatic and technically minded than them.
These are the values my peers will be struggling to inject into architecture and the built environment over the next few years. The problems that face the profession now – its social devaluation, its unresponsiveness to sustainability issues, its political impotence – will soon be ours to face alone. We need to learn how to harness our energies to address these challenges. And we need our bosses to see past our restlessness, and find the patience to teach us how to meet them.
Kerwin Datu, Paris, February 2006
All quotes taken from the article "The young and the restless", Sydney Morning Herald, Owen Thomson, 14th April, 2007.