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When asked what sort of organisations they want to work for, Dr Tony Holland says his students tell him that they prefer companies which can offer “extra features such as a gym, nice premises, a very young and vigorous culture, some overseas travel and flexibility.”

It’s a change in attitude he’s noticed within the last few years, and it’s all to do with a generation that’s had a bad rap as the “why bother” generation. “Gen Y have never known anything but almost full employment,” he says. “So they tend to be very selective in what they want, they tend to look around to see what an can employer can offer them.”

Holland says his students also expect flexible, hi-tech, mixed-mode learning. “Their expectation is that you’ll be familiar with all the latest trends that are going on in organisations and you will be using the sort of technology that those organisations are using.”

Holland admits that his students are much more demanding these days, because “they view themselves as, (rather than a student of the university), a client of the university. They expect good customer service and part of that customer service is feedback. Often they want an essay on their essay, and that is an awful lot of work. When we ask students what do you want and what can we improve on, it’s all about assessment and feedback.”

But this focus on assessment is misplaced, Dr Holland contends. “The most important factor is the learning, and that’s more true all the time. Very rarely now do you get people working in organisations for more than seven or eight years and as such they need to keep up with their qualifications. As old occupations disappear, they have to reinvent themselves into the new ones.”

Along with learning to learn, Holland believes there is another vital skill that this and future generation need to learn: how to sort the wheat from the chaff in the information age. “People are taking information from the internet and taking it as gospel. They’re not looking at it critically and that would be the skill I’d like to see them learning to learn, to be able to analyse and critically reflect on material and know what is reasonable and what is not.”

As a senior lecturer in workplace and organisational learning, it goes without saying that his own approach to teaching has altered in response. “Twenty years ago when I started here, most of our students knew a whole lot less about IT than we did, and now you’re getting people who have quite well developed skills and they expect you to have at least as good skills as they do. If you’re not credible and up to date, they basically write you off.”

While new technology and higher expectations have dramatically increased lecturers’ workloads, Holland says it’s just part of the job. “We can’t change time and social things, so what we’ve got to do is do the new stuff better.”

By Jo Chipperfield
U Magazine

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