This year’s AIESEC Asia Pacific Symposium in Hong Kong was attended by delegates who flew in from around the Asia region, along with a handful from even further afield. The symposium’s remit was to develop interaction between diverse organisations and the student talent; the intention being to boost business leader’s understanding of the perspectives and attitudes of the Asian young generation, while for students to learn more about business issues.
Topics covered included CSR, Gen Y, employer branding, career development, youth leadership and diversity issues. AIESEC is the world’s largest student-run organisation.
The president of AIESEC HK opened by saying “Too often there are too many differences between the expectations of university students and the corporates,” adding that he hoped the symposium would bring both closer together. On another key difference in attitude he highlighted, “If you talk about five- or tenyear career development to the current generation they will just ignore you… they regard three years as too long for Embracing Workplace Generation Gaps career development.” Finally, he jokingly reminded organisations, “The coming generation will be taking over society pretty soon, you cannot disagree.”
The keynote speaker, Eddie Ng Hak-kim, Chairman of Human Capital Management, asked the question ‘can you really tell people what your career plan is?’ He believes the answer for most is no: they cannot say where they really expect to be in ten years time. But, when applying for jobs, saying you want any job being offered is not the right answer either. This raises the question of what young people should actually say. Ng believes that Gen Y has a keen supply of energy and the passion, but is sometimes overly focussed on one thing. Ng noted that some HR professionals had said of Gen Y “I love them but I don’t want to hire them.” For Gen Y, they need to look carefully at what company they are applying for, to check more closely what they will be a part of.
For the companies, extensive testing can help young candidates understand what they are committing to, and can even weed out some candidates who are applying for the job merely for the sake of apply for a job. If a young person does all the research before applying, joked Ng, “Then if you end up in the wrong job who is to blame.” A later speaker, Shalini Mahtani, founder and CEO of community business, talked more on Gen Y. She noted that previously groupings for diversity had taken in ethnicity, gender, sexuality, but highlighted that more recently age was being considered a factor: both for aging workers and Gen Y. Organisations are now thinking of interventions to attract and retain both groups, because it has been shown that specialised interventions are needed. She noted the difference between the AIESEC of now and the AIESEC of many years ago, with the marked difference being that the current AIESEC students are not just chasing high pay. New initiatives from AIESEC look at CSR, with Mahtani saying that this generation “is very much about defining what CSR means.” She went on to say that companies, whilst cutting back on areas like marketing, are questioning cutting back on CSR because it is so important to potential Gen Y employees.
Mahtani warned that Gen Y is also known for asking for the impossible. She cited, for example, first-time jobbers often asking for international. She also underlined a worrying trend in India, and China, where Gen Y look for inappropriate business; for example they come into a job as a secretary but ask to be called a managing director. She noted also that companies are looking at new ways of engaging and recruiting Gen Y, including using Facebook to advertise jobs. She noted also that because of Gen Y’s attachment to the idea of family a number of firms, especially in India, are looking at ways of engaging Gen Y’s parents, including open days for the parents of prospective employees. Finally she called on the younger generation to continue to push companies to look at CSR, and also to continue to be guided by values. To Gen Y itself she called on them to “act smart, not spoilt.” She said Gen Y might be the future, but its members must remember that the company they work for will be multigenerational and they must cohere with the other generations.
Finally panellists, including HR Magazine’s own Paul Arkwright, discussed a number of issues, including what the word talent really means. Ideas include talent just being another word for staff, but the new usage of the word reflecting a changing attitude in HR where staff are perceived more in terms of value. For headhunters, however, talent is whatever skills the business is looking for—a question of the match between a candidate’s ability and attitude with what the job needs.
Further panellists recommended students think of themselves as being like an enterprise with services that they could offer to companies.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
