What is Work? Career Satisfaction for a Global Youth Culture

According to the United Nations Population Fund, there are more than a 1.5 billion people worldwide between the ages of 10 and 25.

Look ten years into the future and that's 1.5 billion+ young people in an ever-more global job market.

Jennifer Kushell is an expert in the "global" part of that reality.

Jen was born into an entrepreneurial family. Fifteen years ago, at age 19, Jen, she decided that she wanted to forge her own kind of career path.

The head of Subway had started his business as a teen, she told me, over the phone from California. The founder of Pizza Hut was 20 when he started his business. She found their stories inspirng.

Jen had read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, at age 15. And she thought there should be a way for young people like herself to get their entrepreneur on.

But there wasn't.

And so, she turned that "lack of something she wanted" into her life's career opportunity.

The first step of highly effective people is to be proactive.

Jen decided to become an authority on the entrepreneurial desires, needs and ways of youth. To that end, she launched a Young Entrepreneurs Network on CompuServe.

This was back in 1994.Online media was in its infancy.

But, in a phone call from LA, Jen explained the logic of her move. The DIY nature of young entrepreneurs and the on-demand access offered by the Internet were a perfect match. It was, to note another character trait of effective people, a win-win. She soon found herself on CNN, speaking as the voice of the New Work generation.

These days, Jen's company, YSN, works with young people in 50 countries. Her primary goal is help young people hone their personal passions into satisfying professional forms.

If you noted the words "personal" and "satisfying" in the paragraph above, you've picked up something vital about Global Youth's ideal of Work.

According to YSN's recent survey of kids in 50 countries, young people outside the US view their dream job as their top priority - above a dream life partner.

This concept is a dramatic change for young people from countries and cultures where hewing to tradition or expectations is the norm.

It's also a useful model for people seeking to find career happiness at any age.

As we noted earlier in this series, humankind's innate "urge to equilibrium," can make life changes scary.

But in an online age where Subway exists in 91 countries and blockbuster movies open worldwide within weeks, Old World analog job definitions are giving way to a New Globality of thought and action. Young people worldwide have become a cohort connected by companies, products and media. And job seekers would do well to do so, too.

"The minute your paradigm changes, the world begins to change," Jen says.

So how do you change your paradigm?

It all starts with the idea that desire and hard work can eliminate boundaries - global; cultural; personal.

"Ambition is the price of admission," Jen says.

Here are her tips to young job seekers. They can be helpful to those of us redefining our careers in mid-stream, too:

1) Bag the should's.

This idea came up in an earlier in this series. But it bears repeating.

"If you're looking at life according to should vs wanna, reassess," Jen says.

Don't worry! You can tailor your dream to fit reality. But first, you need to know what it is.

2) Use the Tools

Even if you're creating your career from scratch (like the owners of the Boulder, CO cupcake and t-shirt shop profiled earlier in this series), tools exist to help you build your job from scratch.

Try searching for, "How to become a (your dream job here)" online, Jen suggests.

Do not worry about whether you can become a (your dream job here) given the fact that (insert random excuse here.)

Do the research. The information will inspire you.

3) Redefine success.

There's no surer recipe for confusion that charging ahead toward someone else's goals and happiness.

Ask yourself what you really want - and listen to what you have to say.

Once you know where you're trying to go, you can search for ways to get there.

4) Take control of your own path.

As we saw in our last post, a young woman who had started college hoping to become a traditional MD spent a summer laying bricks before heading on her true career path as a naturopathic physician.

What did bricklaying have to do with naturopathy? Nothing...except for the fact that they both were her personal ideas of happiness.

YSN offers a career personality analysis quiz on their site, which can help young and more seasoned job-happiness seekers learn more about their ideal way of working. (The basic quiz is free. There's a fee for a more detailed report.)

According to my YSN quiz, I'm a strategic person who tackles problems creatively, reassures teams and likes to execute complex tasks on my own.

It also suggested I might like to examine my allergy to needless structure (okay, I said needless. They said structure.)

And my tendency to break rules. But hey, no one's perfect -- not even a quiz.

And identifying where things could be better can make way for true career happiness.

Jennifer Kushell found hers by asking herself: "What am I doing with my life?"

By using herself as her first client, she found her answer -- and laid the groundwork for a company that sees Work in global terms, and young people as a dynamic pan-national force.

Follow Sharon Glassman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sharonglassman

Comments

[MerrieWay]

Wonderful.­..making a plan and working it - is a success ticket. Bravo Jen for the impact you have on struggling young people, finding their way in the workforce. During these challenging times, they need support more than ever.