Career Trends

We all know that millennials are tech savvy, diverse and highly motivated when it comes to advancing their professional careers. But did you know that they're also passionate about social causes? 

Millennials — roughly defined as someone in their late teens to someone in their early 30s and often labeled as “lazy” and “self-centered” by those from older generations — not only want to help make the world a better place, they’re actually doing something about it.

The fact that many of us had to overcome significant hurdles as we banged our heads against the glass ceiling doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to help smooth the path for the women who come after us. If we don’t, how can we expect our male colleagues to do so? As Madeleine Albright famously quipped, in her 2006 keynote address to the WNBA, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

When Bentley senior Aaron Pinet walked in to a job interview at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the first question he got wasn’t about his grade point average or accounting courses. The conversation starter was his service-learning work: presenting policy-related research on energy literacy to congressmen on Capitol Hill, or developing a financial literacy curriculum for prospective college students.

Higher education has taken a hit lately for not preparing graduates for a successful career. Arguments are flying that graduates walk across the stage with degrees that have left them ill-equipped for today’s complex workplace. In particular, employers are disillusioned by their inability to relate to and manage millennials. It would be easy to dismiss this as a generational gap, or millennials not understanding the realities of the workplace, but the story is more complicated.

When asked in Bentley’s Preparedness Survey what they most want in new millennial hires, business decision makers identified “integrity” as the top quality.

But can integrity be taught? 

In this final installment of our seven-week Careers of the Future Series, Fred Ledley, professor of Natural and Applied Sciences and Management as well as director of the Bentley Center for Integration of Science and Industry, explores what exactly it takes for millennial students to prepare for tomorrow's careers — including those can't even be imagined today. 

Millennials: Interested in an accounting career? In this sixth installment of our seven-week Careers of the Future series, Karen Osterheld, senior lecturer of Accountancy, explores the both the challenges and opportunities that await graduates with the critical thinking, analytical and communication skills needed to meet the rapidly growing demand for accounting professionals. 

In this fifth installment of our seven-week Careers of the Future series, Aaron Jackson, associate professor of economics and director of the Bentley Honors Program, makes the case that a range of broad career opportunities awaits students who have the critical thinking and problem-solving skills gained through an economics degree education. 

There’s good reason for America’s colleges and corporations to focus on millennials. The latest data indicate that approximately half the workforce in the United States will be millennial by 2020. At many accounting, finance and professional service firms, the average age of the workforce today is 27, which puts them squarely in the midst of the Millennial Movement. It’s also important to point out that the oldest millennials — who are nearing 35 — can be counted among the nation’s leading entrepreneurs, managers and executives.