Technology Culture Shock

Brittany Ballenstedt has a good new post up at Wired Workplace about the disjunction between young employees' expectations of what workplace technology will be like and what's actually available in federal workplaces:

Andrew Krzmarzick, director of community engagement for GovLoop and writer of the Generation Shift blog, said Friday that the results of the survey should be a wake-up call for federal agencies to begin paying attention to the ways Millennials have grown accustomed to working and communicating.

"Let's say the Baby Boomers showed up to work and found there were no land-line phones," Krzmarzick said. "That's the kind of shock that the Millennial generation is experiencing when they get into an office and are not issued a workstation or a laptop, find that there's no high-speed Internet, or realize that social media is blocked."

I definitely think it's important for there to be continuity between how federal agencies reach out to new employees and what kind of communication tools they provide once they get there--or at least clarity about what the differences are going to be. Obviously young federal employees going into agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency can't reasonably expect as open-source an environment as they experience in the outside world. But if agencies with less classified missions are acting on the assumption that their younger employees are communicating via social networking when they hire them, they shouldn't assume that those employees will be ready or comfortable totally leaving off their preferred methods of communicating when they enter government.