Your keynote speeches around the world have also focused on Generation Z. What unique challenges are facing this generation, and how do we need to change the way we educate to equip them to navigate those challenges successfully? Are the changes you’re envisaging evolutionary or revolutionary ones?
Well, I don’t believe anything is revolutionary; I think everything is an iteration of something else. There are no new, no transformational ideas – or, rather, even the most transformational ideas are based on something else, and, as such, I prefer to speak of an iteration-based model. The phone into which I’m speaking right now isn’t a new concept, but an iteration of an older phone, which is itself an iteration of a previous phone, and so forth, and so on. But when I’m talking about Generation Z, I’m talking about those that are born around the Year 2000, that’s the mark that I use, and I think that we can use that as a baseline to mark this generation. So they’re about seventeen years old right now, and they’re focused on a couple of different things, but there’s a couple of different things that we need to understand about them. For example, they’re the first true digital generation. They’re born online, they don’t know what the world looked like before Google, before smartphones, before tablets – you know, they don’t know what the world looked like before wifi, as a matter of fact.
But we also have to look at the social aspects of who they are. For example, I call them the ‘Great Recession Generation’ – they’re the generation that, for the last seventeen years, have seen us dealing with economic issues, and they have watched those economic issues play out: with their parents, who worked hard, did well, and then went out and lost their job. Or their siblings, who went out, and took out $100,000, $200,000 in student debt just to come back and live in their basement.
This generation watched that, so it’s no wonder that 60% of them are worried about work, or 70% of them want to work for themselves: they don’t want that dependency on a job. They want to control their destiny; they want to control their life.The second thing that we have to consider about them is that they’re what I call the ‘9/11 Generation’. They don’t know what the world looked like before 9/11; they’ve watched everything from terrorism happen – nationally, locally, globally; they’ve watched gun violence in schools; they’ve been doing live-shooter drills since they were five years old. This is the world that they know. But on top of that, all they know about the environment is that we are dying; the planet is dying. So they’re what I call the ‘Climate Change Generation’, too, and they become, because of this – because of 9/11, because of terrorism, because of gun violence, because of the environment, because of all these social issues, they become the problem-solving generation.
That’s what they want to do. They don’t want to have a regular job, and even those that do want a job don’t want ‘just any job’ – they want to have an impact, and they want to have a meaningful career, if you will. They care more about their experiences than they do about their moving-up through a company, so I think that we have to look at Generation Z and think about these things – and that’s without getting into, say, demographic issues in terms of what the next generation’s going to look like.
We haven’t defined who the next generation is, the generation of my four-year-old, but you know, if you think about it from a demographics perspective, she is the majority of kids that are going to be around in the next 10, 15, 20 years. She is going to be looking at the world differently.