Millennials — The Beat (Up) Generation. That’s the headline of the new Psychology Today magazine and online story that 
includes an interview with LERN’s own generational guru Julie Coates.
The story, by Abby Ellin, begins “They’re narcissistic. Impatient. And just try to get them to work nine to five. Trouble is, the conventional view of Millennials just may be all wrong. They’re charging into a world the rest of us are resisting.”
Check out the full story on Psychology Today.
More from LERN’s Coates in the story:
“Millennials have self-confidence and assuredness, and these characteristics can be off-putting to people in older generations who feel that because of their age and experience young people should be more deferential toward them,” says Julie Coates, an adult-learning specialist in River Falls, Wisconsin, and the co-author of Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Century. “But this is not a deferential generation.”
Take training. When learning, says Coates, Boomers are happy to watch a PowerPoint presentation with a broad overview. Millennials, on the other hand, are interested only in the information needed to complete the task at hand. “Millennials say, ‘When I need it, I will learn it,'” says Coates. “If the relevance isn’t observable, their attention won’t be there. The task of Millennials in learning is to understand how to eliminate unnecessary information; in previous generations finding the right information was the challenge.”