This article is part of an ongoing series profiling participants in the PubTech Connect conference, presented on April 20, 2017 by PW and the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Publishing.
Lindsey Pollak is a world-renowned expert on millennials in the workforce. She has an intuitive understanding, honed through working with millennials and employers, of what today's young workers are looking for in a job, and what they have to offer prospective employers. She has spoken to or consulted for leading companies including LinkedIn, Verizon, and CNBC, as well as at schools like Wharton and Princeton. Like Kathryn Minshew, her co-presenter on the Tapping Talent track at PubTech Connect, she simply gets how to attract millennials to great companies and how companies can get the most out of working with them.
“Millennials want what we all want, they're just much more vocal about asking for it,” she said in a talk available on her Web site. She advises companies to engage their millennial employees in all aspects of their enterprises. Millennials, she pointed out, are eager to understand how their work fits into the big picture. This is important to remember, she said, because millennials are the business leaders of the not-too-distant future. “What young people want from the workforce is growth, development, coaching, and training, even more than money,” she said in the same talk.
Pollak traces the genesis of her career to her time as a dorm RA when she was studying at Yale. On her site, she describes her younger self telling a career coach “how much I loved being an RA and wished I could do that forever.” What she loved was “advising college students on their academics, extracurriculars, career paths and life choices, and serving as a resource.” But how do you make a career out of that? The coach, as well as a startup CEO at a company Pollak worked at briefly just before the dot com bust, both advised her to start her own business doing exactly what she loved. Finally, she took the leap and began “freelance writing and giving speeches on the only topic I knew: how to be a young person figuring out what to do with your life.”
Pollak is the New York Times bestselling author of Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World and Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders, two books that help millennials get the most out of their work and anticipate the future business world that they will shape. She also maintains a weekly blog with posts on topics ranging from how to manage millennials to tips for composing emails. It's a treasure trove of advice for young job seekers and employers.
At PubTech Connect, Pollack and Minshew will share their wealth of insight about today's young workers and the future of business during the Tapping Talent panel. Find out more and buy tickets here.
