Celtic cubs lower expectations
Reproduced by permission
Gabrielle Monaghan
18 January 2009
The Sunday Times
2009 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
When the economy was roaring, Irish employers complained that pampered Celtic tiger cubs strolled into job interviews with iPods on, demanded staggering salaries and asked what the company could offer them. Then they would quit six months later for a better-paying job.
But new research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a professional services firm, suggests the children of the boom may be paring back their expectations.
The perception that Ireland's youngest crop of workers are greedy, disloyal to employers and reject traditional work practices is a myth, according to a survey of 4,200 new graduates inIreland and abroad. PWC's findings are that 81% of Irish graduates expect to have between just two and five employers during their careers, compared with 75% worldwide.
Only 2% expect to work mostly flexible hours and 43% see themselves doing the majority of their work in an office during regular hours. This contrasts with a survey released by High Fliers Research, a British company, last April.
It found that a quarter of final-year university students expected to work for at least three companies during their twenties and that they intended to spend less than three years in their first job, where they expected to fetch a starting salary of 27,500.
However, the Ireland Graduates Survey 2009 found almost one third expected to reach a senior management position by the time they were 30 and one in five believed they would be earning 100,000 by that age.
"Judging from the work we do with organisations, expectations have changed because of the economic picture and people seem to be glad to have a job," said Mark Carter, a partner at PWC Ireland. "And the L'Oreal generation ['Because I'm worth it'] no longer expect a total tearing up of the traditional employment contract." A report from Deloitte in September 2007 found almost half of young workers expected to retire between the ages of 51 and 60, even though 71% did not contribute to a pension plan.
Over half of the "millennials" polled by PWC believed they would personally fund their own retirement, none of them expecting thestate to finance it, and just 12% believing their employer would pay for their pension.
"The young people surveyed are highly educated professionals who recognise that that there will increasingly be a larger population of old people whose retirement will have to be supported by a much smaller young population," Carter said. So much for the generation once described by the Wall Street Journal as "Überstroked kids reaching adulthood" or, as the online magazine Entrepreneur.com described them, "slackers, whiners and praise-junkies".
