Graduate divas – don’t you love them

Why am I not surprised at Catrin Griffith’s leader in The Lawyer, Why the law’s no safe haven.

. . . for a generation that has been raised on tales of riches, it will take a while for reality to sink in. Indeed, plenty of graduate recruitment heads are privately frustrated at Generation Y, which has been used to having everything on a plate, and hope the credit crunch could be the making of its members.

But perhaps the real reason why “opportunities for those entering the profession now look rather more limited” is less about the credit crunch (though that undoubtedly is a factor) and rather more about what the future of legal services in the UK may be. It comes back to Stephen Mayson’s warning, “too many qualified lawyers, too many law firms” (see my earlier post, The C word, but which one?).

. . . and as for generation Y lawyers, see Jordan Furlong’s post in Law 21 back in May, How to work with Boomer lawyers.

A tale of two generations

At a dinner last month, the host (Chairman of a Business Angels Network) and I realised that we were probably the oldest two in a room of 50. It is not that we are that old (mid-50s), but that in the work we do clients and colleagues are getting younger. Law 21, one of my law blog feeds, had a series of interesting posts some weeks ago on the issues both of employing Generation Y and having Generation Y as clients.

Law 21 is Canadian law blog, but the problems either side of the Atlantic are the same, and there is little difference in the way we approach the issues (or, as is often the case, don’t), and it is certainly not just technology but culture as well.

I thought of this again the day before yesterday. The day started at Twofour Communications in Plymouth, at an event both celebrating their 20 years in business and targeted at the South West professional community, to whom they would like to sell more services. What was most noticeable was that almost without exception the guests were a generation older than the hosts (which led me to ask whether they had in fact asked the right people). At the end of the day Caroline and I were at The Northcott Theatre in Exeter, for a concert by Tasmin Little and John Lenehan, as part of the Exeter Summer Festival. Here we were among the younger members of the audience. The contrast between my day’s start and finish could not have been clearer, or more illustrative of the the different worlds in which we now live and work.

Generational issues are much in my mind as a lawyer, and not just the prospect of employing Graduate Divas. Nicholas Carr’s closing to his latest book, The Big Switch, is relevant both to lawyers, and also to Twofour,

All technical change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It is in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

Life was ever thus.

What are you? A Boomer, Generation X, Millenial or Silent retiree?

At a dinner earlier in the week, the host (Chairman of a Business Angels Network) and I realised that we were probably the oldest two in a room of 50. It is not that we are that old (mid-50s) but that in the work we do clients and colleagues are getting younger. Law 21, one of the blogs I regularly read, has had a series of interesting posts in the past few days on the issues both of employing Generation Y and having Generation Y as clients. Law 21 is Canadian law blog, but the problems either side of the Atlantic are the same, and there is little difference in the way we approach the issues (or, as is often the case, don’t), and it is certainly not just technology but culture as well. Graduate Divas as lawyers.

Mind the gap?

Yesterday evening at the Business Leaders Forum at Exeter University, and an interesting take on Generation Y by Richard Wyatt-Haines (you can find more on Mind the gap: managing and retaining your graduate entrants on his website). Our table (and it seems much of the audience) was not entirely persuaded. Is Generation Y so very different to the previous one, or the one before that (see my post on Graduate Divas)? My next door neighbour and I (both the same generation) decided that it was not Generation Y that was so different: we thought they were quite like our generation, but the one in between. What is different is the context, how life appears to be, although is what is happening in Tibet as I write so very different to what happened in Hungary in 1956 (I was four) and what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (when I was 16)?

Graduate divas

See Liz Hoggard’s A London Life column in today’s Evening Standard, commenting on a recent report (not cited) which has apparently concluded that Generation Y and UK bosses are “speaking in different languages”. She says she can’t help admiring the new breed of “graduate divas”, who are ‘young [born after 1982], university educated, techno-savvy’ and ‘know themselves to be in great demand’. But if my daughter (young [born in 1985], university educated (Warwick) and techno-savvy-ish (knows how to turn the PC on) is anything to go by, they are not really much different to how Liz Hoggard and her contemporaries were in the late Eighties. And didn’t she think then that her generation spoke a different language to the older generation? I did in the early Seventies.