I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while. First it sat in my idea pad for several months and now I’ve been writing random thoughts down for at least a month. I’m finally doing something about it and writing about generation mobile!
What’s more important than millennials, generation x, y, z, lmnop? A generation of people who work mobile, travel mobile, and in general live mobile. They don’t belong to a specific age group. They don’t even fit into a compartmentalized category, they just love to live free of wires, but connected to the world.
Unless you live under a shell, you’re bombarded by generational hype every day. Usually about millennials and baby boomers. I’m sick of it, really I am. I’m sometimes classified as a millennial and sometimes as gen x. Well, I don’t care what generation I’m classified as or what anybody else is, I love technology and I love mobile. I’m more digital literate than most kids today, and I know many others who are too.
Leave all that propaganda behind, just give me a mobile phone and a mobile friendly web and I’m happy. Don’t make me go into isolation away from my family because you think I wouldn’t want to do that activity from a mobile phone. I do! I want to do everything on my phone that I’d otherwise have to do on a computer had this been 2002. I wrote about this desire of the modern web to be free from the notion that only certain activities are preferred on a mobile phone:
Stop Trying To Predict Mobile Users Needs
Dividing the World
Rather than dividing groups into generations based off of age, it seems wiser to divide them into generations of lifestyle choices/desires.
We are living in the era of mobile where vast swaths of the population are bucking the trend of being tied to a desk. Freedom and balance is valued over everything else across the span of ages. We should be speaking about generation mobile. A growing part of the population who live, work, and play untethered from everything.
The most defining generation of the 21st century is not classified by age, it’s classified by the desire to be free. Embrace the change while not disturbing those that don’t wish to change.
Generation mobile extends all reaches of age and thanks to cheap technology, can even extend beyond wealth.
Learning to Be Mobile
Many groups and industries are doing things right in the shift towards catering to generation mobile. Marketing, User Experience, financial, and airlines all have organizations who are doing great things.
Learning & Development is definitely behind when catering to generation mobile. The focus on moving to work with generation mobile can’t be to focus on creating content for mobile devices only.
Content creation is a small piece of the puzzle for L&D to move into mobile. The focus for those interested in catering to generation mobile should be in curation of resources and discussion around ways to improve performance.
Given a choice, I would rather learn about diversity and inclusion through discussion and exploration over a formal course presented by L&D.
Fostering conversations and curating resources that help employees do their job better is the most important role mobile can play for L&D trying to work with generation mobile.