Generation X

Generation X is used for people born between roughly the mid-1960s and about 1980. The boundaries are conventions that vary between sources, and nothing turns on them: a person born in 1980 is not meaningfully different from one born in 1981.

The label originated in Western commentary and was applied to India afterwards, which matters because the events used to characterise the cohort in its country of origin are not the events that shaped it here.

In an Indian workplace today, this cohort largely occupies senior individual contributor, management and executive roles. That position, rather than any trait, is what makes assumptions about them consequential.

Before any of this is useful, a caution about the category itself. Claims that a generation shares workplace traits are weakly supported, because three things are tangled together and only one of them is generational.

• Life stage. A twenty-five year old and a fifty year old want different things from work, and always have. That is age, not cohort, and it travels with people as they get older.
• Career stage. Someone three years into a career behaves differently from someone twenty years in, regardless of when they were born.
• Period effects. A recession, a pandemic or a hiring boom affects everyone present at the time, not only the youngest of them.

Once those are separated, the residue attributable to the cohort itself is small. Most confident statements about what a generation wants at work are restatements of what people at that age and career stage have generally wanted.

What does differ, and differs genuinely, is the conditions a cohort entered the labour market under. Those conditions are historical facts rather than personality claims, and they shape expectations in ways that are worth understanding.

The distinctive feature of this cohort's working life in India is that it began on one side of a structural change and continued on the other.

Those entering work in the late 1980s did so in an economy where public sector and established private employment were the recognised destinations, career paths were long and employer-defined, and job security was a central expectation. The 1991 liberalisation altered the range of employers, the pace of change and the terms on which careers were built, and it did so while this cohort was in early career.

The growth of IT services and business process work through the 1990s and 2000s then arrived in their mid-career, creating employers and roles that had not existed when they entered.

• They experienced employer-defined career paths first and self-directed ones later, having been trained to expect the first.
• They saw job security stop being a default, which tends to produce a more transactional reading of employment than the preceding cohort held.
• Many made a sector transition mid-career that later cohorts never had to make.
• A large share are the first generation in their family to work in a corporate rather than an agricultural, government or family-business setting.

These are historical conditions, not personality descriptions, and they explain expectations far better than any trait list does.

Used as a management input, a cohort label produces bad decisions and legal exposure at the same time.

The third row is the most expensive. Withdrawing development from people on the assumption that their remaining tenure is short is self-fulfilling, since it gives them a reason to leave.

It is also the assumption most likely to look like age discrimination when the pattern of who receives development, promotion or redundancy selection is examined.

The practical alternative is to manage for the things the cohort label is standing in for, and to ask rather than infer.

• Manage life stage explicitly, since caring responsibilities in both directions are common at this age and are a scheduling and flexibility question rather than a commitment question.
• Treat career stage as the variable in development conversations. What someone twenty years in needs is different from what someone three years in needs, and neither follows from birth year.
• Check the distribution of development, progression and selection decisions by age band. If the pattern is uneven, an assumption is operating whether or not anyone has stated it.
• Ask individuals what they want next. The answers vary far more within an age band than between age bands, which is the finding that undermines the whole category.

Where the organisation wants to understand differences across its workforce, tenure, career stage and role are more informative cuts than birth cohort, and they carry none of the discrimination risk.