Move over Millennials, it's time to make room for Generation Z.
Generation Z is the group of people born in the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. According to research, this group of roughly 61 million people will make up about 20 percent of the workforce in the next two years.
But who is Generation Z and what things matter or don't matter to them? ABC15 sat down with teenagers Ashley Enright and Ezequias Fuentes to get to know Generation Z a little bit better.
When asked what some of the characteristics that describe their generation, Enright answered, "Impatient, like we're very fast-paced. I think we want to get to the finish line before we realized how many steps we have to take."
According to the Huffington Post, these individuals are multi-taskers who are fully submerged in the digital world.
"You have Twitter, you have Instagram, Snapchat...Um...I don't have any games on my phone. No games," Fuentes laughs. No games because, as they say, time is money and that's what they're paying attention to -- they're making sure to avoid debt at all costs.
"It's talked about all throughout high school...you get a lot of, 'Loans are bad! Loans are bad! Don't ever take out any loan,'" Enright recalls.
This is thanks in big part to Millennials and the millions of dollars they racked up going to school, struggling to find a job.
Jennifer Ward is the Arizona President of the Employer's Council. It's her job to help her clients get ready for this new group -- a group that's getting a jump start on jobs.
"We're seeing a lot of Generation Z enter the workforce earlier because of that element of not wanting to take out student loans for college."
They're also the most diverse generation of all of them, looking for a job that aligns with moral views.
"They have a story or they have a mission; that's why I would be working for the company...to support that if I believe that and their value aligns with my values," Fuentes says.
And even though they're more connected to the world, they prefer to go it alone when it comes to projects and tasks.
"This is a much more individualistic generation so they want to work independently. They don't necessarily want to do as much of the collaboration as Millennials have wanted to do," Ward says.
She tells her clients to make sure they're focusing their branding on this group, especially on the Internet.
Ward adds, "Your online presence is key when it comes to Gen Z. They're going to be looking at sites like Glassdoor, even Yelp, to see how you treat your customers."
