Feature — Who Is Gen Z?
WHO ARE THEY? Renowned Millennial and Gen Z expert
Lindsey Pollak points out five things you should know about Generation Z. Gen Zers are…
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Diverse. Gen Z will be the most diverse and the first multicultural majority generation in American history. They’ve grown up with an AfricanAmerican president and same sex marriage as the law of the land. “There’s a movement of kids today to not check a box for what ethnicity they are on a school form because you are lots of different ethnicities. This idea that identity is a mish-mosh of a lot of things,” says Pollak. “Diversity is an expectation, it is simply a fact of life.”
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Cautious realists. “This is the generation that came of age as youths during the financial crisis. So the reality of growing up when times are economically tough—when the bottom fell out of the global economy—is somewhat similar to the generation that grew up with the Great Depression,” says Pollak, adding that knowing how bad things can get, “they become savers and more cautious in their financial choices.”
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Visual communicators. Long e-mails are not the way to reach them. In fact, don’t even bother sending e-mails—they’re antiquated. “They have grown up on emoji, Snapchat, and Instagram. Even the 140 characters of Twitter are too many for them,” says Pollak. “If a picture used to be worth 1,000 words, now it’s worth all the words.”
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Mobile-first. “Gen Z is the first mobile-first generation. Certainly, Millennials are very comfortable with their phones, but Gen Z has taken it to a different level,” says Pollak.
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Entrepreneurial. “Because of people like Mark Zuckerberg we think, ‘oh, Millennials are such big entrepreneurs.’ We actually looked at the business start numbers—Millennials are not entrepreneurial,” says Pollak, “but Gen Zs, when you do studies on them in high school, we see a rise in entrepreneurial classes and clubs.” A translator among generations, Lindsey Pollak is the leading voice on millennials in the workplace and a frequent speaker at universities around the US, including at Pace. Her advice has appeared in media outlets including TODAY, The New York Times, CNN, and NPR.
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