IFPO's Chris Hertig with another great interview this time with SecurityMagazine's Diane Ritchey:

Millennials like Snapchat, digital banking, online shopping, Whataburger, selfies and Robinhood, the app that lets you trade stocks without paying fees. They also prefer to support local, independent businesses, not global chains; and increasingly, they are living at home and delaying starting a family.

And according to some reports, they also are not very loyal workers, and they demand more from their employers than other generations.

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But keeping millennial employees (born between 1981-2002) happy is critical, not only because these workers are more aware of their options but also because of the size of the group. According to Pew Research, the millennials are now America’s largest living generation, larger even than the baby boomers.

So, businesses have to adjust how they nurture loyalty among these workers or risk losing a large percentage of their workforces.

According to the Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016, millennials, in general, express little loyalty to their current employers, and many are planning near-term exits. This shocking absence of allegiance represents a serious challenge to any business employing a large number of millennials, especially those in markets like the United States, where millennials now represent the largest segment of the workforce. However, because most young professionals choose organizations that share their personal values, it’s not too late for employers to overcome this “loyalty challenge.”

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For example, the study said, almost 90 percent of millennials surveyed in the study said that they would choose to stay in a job for the next 10 years if they knew they’d get annual raises and upward career mobility.

Another recent millennial survey by Qualtrics, a Utah-based survey software firm, and firm Accel Partners found that investing in millennial employees during their first 90 days on the job is key to retaining them. Companies need to try harder at giving millennials a valuable reason to stay, which should go way beyond free food or a cool office, or a work-at-home situation. Workplace happiness is about upward mobility:
promotions, salary increases and the like.

Feeder Systems

Clearly, it’s difficult to attract and retain talent with millennials, and even more so with the security industry. How is the industry attracting and retaining talent in physical and enterprise security? Why are millennials entering the profession? And why aren’t they?

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“Unfortunately, short shrift has been given to the lower rungs of the career ladder,” says Chris Hertig, CPP, former college professor at York College of Pennsylvania. “There has instead been a traditional emphasis on mid- or senior-level management by folks in the industry,” Hertig says, who is a member of the Young Professionals Council of ASIS. “Because of that we don’t have ‘feeder systems’ into security management, except for second-career professionals and retirees. Compounding the problem is that security as an academic discipline has not taken root on college campuses. Without an academic base in research and theory, no field can become a true profession. But security keeps trying to be the first!”

Read the rest of the story here.