Preparing Procurement for the Millennial Workforce

I recently came across a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article on ‘Solving Gen Y’s Passion Problem’, and the very next day I read our very own Richard Waugh’s interview with CPO Rising on bringing in the millennial workforce to the world of procurement. Let’s say that the ‘Gen Y’ is this ‘millennial workforce’ and let’s apply some of what HBR tells us about Gen Y in the light of what Richard Waugh has to say about this new batch of workforce about to swarm the working world.

The Baby Boomer versus The Millennial workforce

The HBR says, that the Gen Y (or the generation born between 1983 and the 2000s) is the ‘worst’ generation ever to be born! Oops. That sounds scary. It goes on to say that this generation has been ‘pampered’ and is ‘high maintenance’. The New York Times also called this entity ‘The Generation Why Bother’. Even University of Hampshire published a similar study in which it claimed that managers often report facing a lot of problems dealing with such workforce as it comes with unrealistic expectations and is not receptive of negative feedback. Certainly, Gen Y seems to have grown up with the idea of being intrinsically ‘entitled’ to prosperity.

So what happens when this ‘not-so-worker-bee-like’ workforce enters the procurement occupation? They sure would be great at adopting technologies. But will they settle for legacy systems and incumbent ERP tools? Doesn’t look like.

So if you are reading this blog, and are still not sure what this implies, then picture your nephew, niece, child or younger sibling and ask yourself this one question. ‘Will they be happy to take up what you do day in and day out?’ If the answer is a firm no, then your organization has to walk that extra mile to make its procurement job roles exciting, inspiring, technologically advanced and even as welcoming as the Amazon or the Facebook!

We at Zycus hope to play a pivotal role in making the procurement job role exciting and attractive to the youth. With state-of-the-art technology, user interface and customizability of software workflows and meta data, we are readying the procurement applications to meet up to the challenge of this new bunch that comes with a lots of expectations and just doesn’t settle for anything less than ‘awesome’.