Engaging with digital natives

We are seeing more and more articles about the impact of digital natives or 'Generation Y' - those born in the mid-1980s onwards - on the workforce. From reading some of them, you could be forgiven for believing that this generation's technical competence and ease, their culture of celebrity and 'now' coupled with increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal lives will cause businesses no end of problems.

However, it is precisely these attributes that make Generation Y valuable assets that our industry should nurture. Their skills can bring great benefit to our businesses. For example, much business success relies on information sharing - something that digital natives are incredibly competent at, as demonstrated by their use of social media, and probably an area in which most businesses could learn something from them.

Besides, despite reports this week about the IT skills shortfall being at a two year low, our industry is still suffering from a skills shortage. We cannot afford to ignore or alienate this generation – like most other industries, we rely on them for our future survival.

In order to engage with them, we need to demonstrate to them the dynamism in our industry: we are not stuffy companies full of grey suits, but a wide-ranging, creative and fast-moving industry. Attracting and retaining those born immediately before the digital natives – late Generation X-ers if you like - is one way of demonstrating to Generation Y that we could relate to them and that they will be able to make a valuable contribution to a diverse sector.

Therefore as well as recruitment, we need to focus on retention. At a recent Intellect Young Professionals Network event, the attendees were asked about what they want from their network. Nearly all the respondents, who come from a wide range of job functions and companies involved in technology, said that they wanted the opportunity to meet and exchange views with senior industry figures, so they could understand each other's thinking and approach.

Like in all industries, in ours there is a gap between senior and junior figures. Working to address this might help with both our retention of Generation X and our recruitment of Generation Y and our businesses are likely to learn quite a bit too.