EMPLOYER ADVICE Bridging the gap to young workers

Consultant helps companies understand and appeal to Generation X.
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
A tall woman with short, frothy hair holds a mobile phone to her ear outside a coffee shop. With her charcoal sweater, wide-wale corduroys and weathered backpack, she could be a hip young professional in any number of urban settings. But this is Milwaukee -- Rebecca Ryan's home.
In the spring of 1998, Ryan was at her fifth job in four years. She was frustrated and restless. Working for others wasn't working for her. She figured she could do better.
"I always felt severely mismanaged, that I had so much that I wanted to bring to the table but for whatever reason managers would kind of cut you off at the pass or take your ideas and run with them," she recalls. She's inside sipping coffee now, her phone tucked away in her backpack.
As she saw it, her post-college job-hopping wasn't so much her fault or the failings of her bosses. She blamed it on a generation gap -- a disconnect between her Generation X and the baby boomer employers who hired her. From that frustration, a business was born.
Ryan is founder and president of Next Generation Consulting -- a five-partner firm that counsels employers and communities across the country on how to appeal to young people. Next Generation's mission, Ryan says, is to help organizations build their futures on youthful terms.
Mission evolves
"I started the business to just translate between the generations. I felt like there was this huge generation of baby boomer managers who could really benefit from seeing the world through the eyes of a Generation Xer," Ryan says.
"The business has evolved to the point where we are now primarily a research house doing a ton of primary research on all aspects of the next generation -- from their work preferences to their choices of community, the reasons why they'll relocate, the reasons why they'll leave an employer. So it's really gone from evangelism mode to heavy research mode to turning out the products to release that research to the world."
Ryan "is doing cutting-edge work on how places can become magnets for creative talent," says Richard Florida, a professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University who is an authority on the subject. "She is a huge asset for Milwaukee and for this entire country."
Ryan, who is 31, is riding the wake of the baby boom, that demographic swell of workers now between the ages of 39 and 57. As those workers retire in droves over the next couple of decades, the next generation will have much fewer replacements to offer.
What's next
In Ryan's backpack is a library book she has been reading: Peter Drucker's "Managing in the Next Society," in which the 92-year-old management guru predicts that a chief challenge ahead for business leaders will be dealing with worldwide shortages of young workers.
"Our product is competitive intelligence about the next generation of workers," Ryan explains. "The market is setting us up for success because any company or community that wants to remain competitive and relies on talent needs to know their labor pool is shrinking and what they can do better."
The approach of Next Generation is to find out what makes young people tick and then to apply that in helping clients identify and improve upon their appeal to those workers. Insights include the notion that young workers tend to first move where they want to live and then seek a job. With that in mind, Next Generation devised its Hot Jobs-Cool Communities Web site (www.hotjobs-cool communi-ties.com), which ranks cities as Gen X-friendly based on such factors as crime rates, commute times, cultural diversity, parks and night spots. (San Francisco ranked first.)
Turning a profit
Begun on April Fool's Day, 1998, Next Generation is on course for its first profitable year, Ryan says. She projects revenue at $600,000, up from "a lot less" last year, when she says 85 percent of the company's income came from her speaking engagements.
On the platform, Ryan is a spellbinder.
At a recent breakfast meeting in Madison, Ryan had 175 business women alternating between tears and peals of laughter as she wove personal anecdotes into motivational advice on how to be receptive and responsive to chances for a more fulfilling life.