As stressful as the last few weeks have been to anyone with a pulse and a 401(k), nothing’s been quite so disturbing to me as the inordinate number of times I’ve been asked, “With the economy the way it is now, will Gen Y stop being so demanding?” It may sound innocuous at first, but once you’ve heard the line a few times, it quickly becomes clear that what it really means is, “Now that you don’t have any choice, will you finally stop forcing us to do right by you and just settle like everyone else, for crying out loud?”

Well, thanks, folks. Good to know that, in all this turmoil, the silver lining for some people is the potentially broken Gen Y spirit.

But don’t start celebrating just yet. As a high-profile Los Angeles businesswoman told me last week, what said schadenfreuders don’t realize is that the outcome of the financial crisis may not be a defeated Gen Y, but a more determined one — determined, that is, to follow fulfilling work. “There won’t be any trust in companies,” she said. And the fact of the matter is, without that trust, corporate America becomes even less attractive to standout young employees than it was before the recession hit. The security that a Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch business card used to mean — never mind the cachet that they carried — began to evaporate as even those peers who chose the “stable” path of, say, financial services found themselves jobless. And as the list of the white-collar unemployed grows longer every day, it’s beginning to look like they’re gone for good.

Believe it or not, a paycheck doesn’t necessarily make up for all that. True, it may get a few young candidates in the door. It may even get them to stay a little while. But as today’s far more footloose Yers wait longer for spouses, kids, and mortgages — the trifecta of entrapment for the company men of generations past — they’ll be harder to corner. Every time they get a paycheck, they’ll be wondering if it’s their last. And they will always resent a company that uses that paycheck as a shackle — not to mention as an excuse not to improve the myriad other aspects of worklife — rather than as a reward for a job well done. So much so that the moment something better appears– whether it’s an NGO in Bangladesh, their own small business, or a plain old better job as the economy stabilizes — they will be out like The Flash.

So what’s a company do? (Besides advise managers not to hope for a generation of employees cowed by financial instability, of course.) It’s simple: See this time as an opportunity, not to snare young candidates while they’re down, but to distinguish your organization as one that can shine in difficult times and, as a result, attract and retain the very best employees. Yers are all about partnership, so talk to them about the challenges your company’s facing, and use those challenges to build that stirring startup energy that gets young hearts beating. And even when layoffs are a must, do them humanely, so all your employees can stay and go with dignity (and without saying mean but true things about you on every blog this side of Gawker).

As a Washington utility executive reminded me recently, Shakespeare wrote, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” We Gen Yers are learning that, I think. Let’s see if the people in charge can, too.

The continuation of Friday’s “My life as a first-year… Entrepreneur, Part I”:

Back to launching the business…

Armed with my great idea, I got to work. On the weekends and at night after work, I started to lay the groundwork. I did a lot of research to make sure that the need for this kind of service was there. It is. The entry-level job market is incredibly competitive. Many of the “hot” entry-level employers these days, including major corporations, government agencies, and even non-profits, hire less than 10% of applicants. That means that getting a job at the Department of State or at a major investment bank or consulting firm or at Teach for America is tougher than getting into Harvard or Williams. And liberal arts colleges aren’t doing much to help their graduates prepare for this competitive process: At Ivy League colleges, the average student to career-counselor ratio is over 1,000 to 1, and undergrad career-oriented clubs are rare.

I also worked on my business plan and budget. Since my goal is to grow this into a national company someday, I wanted to make sure that I built a solid strategic foundation. I came up with the name – no easy task — and I developed program materials. I even started marketing a little bit and working with some “pilot” clients to test the program. Pretty quickly, my focus shifted away from my responsibilities at my old job. Somehow the “direct costs task force” that I’d been selected to lead for my former employer didn’t seem as exciting as getting my new business off the ground, so, thanks to my ever-supportive husband, I got the green light to quit my old job and work on my new venture full time. In classic upbeat, entrepreneurial fashion, I remember assuring him that I’d be up and running in no time and easily generating the equivalent of my old paycheck in no more than a few months.

Not surprisingly, things didn’t move quite as quickly as I’d expected.

Today, an inside look at one entrepreneur’s road to success — in this case, as a career coach. Emily McLellan is the president and founder of Springboard Career Consultants, a company that helps undergrads and twentysomethings identify and realize their professional dreams. An alum of Morgan Stanley (MS) and McKinsey, Emily also spent considerable time in the for-profit education sector, with Kaplan and the Edison Schools — all excellent preparation for her new profession as a career guru for young people. So though this Xer isn’t a first-year corporate American, she is pretty close to a first-year entrepreneur, which is at least as exciting as climbing the corporate ladder. So let the schooling begin…

*****

Three years ago, I would have laughed if someone had suggested that I’d launch my own business. In fact, I remember agreeing when my brother told me that he thought I’d make a great “company [wo]man” — a lifer at an organization whose product and mission I supported and where I could rise through the ranks to a great job in senior management. I guess that where I am now isn’t that far off — I believe in the product we offer, and I have incredible senior management responsibilities. The only difference is that instead of rising through the ranks, I’m creating them.

My motivation for taking some risk and going out on my own came from my idea. It’s good — a lot better and more exciting to work on than anything I was responsible for before — and I quickly became obsessed with making the concept work. The idea, which I think will resonate with many of you, is to provide structured support and guidance to college students and recent graduates entering the job market — to give them the up-to-date, unbiased, and high-quality advice that they aren’t getting on campus or from their parents.

I certainly needed the kind of advice we offer when I was in college!

There are so many things I wanted to write about today, that in the interest of time and sanity, I thought we’d do a little round-up…

• Starting with the Bad Boss Contest by Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Among the semifinalists for best bad-boss story, a guy whose boss threw his paperwork in the trash when he was diagnosed with cancer and tried to file for his paid time off (the leading vote-getter), a woman who was victimized for taking a week off after a miscarriage, and my personal pick for worst, a waitress whose boss not only encouraged a customer who stalked her, but even hired the man as a busboy. Sure makes you appreciate the decent bosses you’ve had over the years. (As does Stanley Bing’s collection of crazy bosses and their employees’ crazy stories.) But I’ve been lucky enough to have some awesome bosses. In fact, my only bad experience was a few years back with an extremely passive-aggressive boss who would avoid one-on-one contact — including things like giving his young staff any guidance — at all costs, and then publicly dress down anyone and everyone for not doing things “right.” Clearly, I didn’t last long there, but I felt bad for him; he was coming up on 40 and still wearing a wallet chain and ripped rocker T-shirts to work, so it wasn’t hard to deduce that he had some identity issues to address, never mind a whole lot of anxiety about getting older. And I was pretty glad of the lesson in the long run. As my mom put it: Consider the source, and keep it moving.
• Speaking of getting older, though, check out Anne Fisher’s column, “From Ivy League to dead-end job,” and all the comments it’s already getting. One of Annie’s recent-grad readers wrote to ask her if, after three months of working in his “first ‘real’ job” doing routine work at a Fortune 500 company and feeling unfulfilled, it would be all right for him to make a move. Annie gave him good advice: Stick it out a while longer, do stellar work regardless, and explore opportunities in other departments. But some readers came down hard — on all that Gen Y entitlement, of course. And I see their point; three months is barely enough to learn people’s names, let alone land your dream project, and entry-level work is rarely stimulating every day. But I think this frustration is a twentysomething thing, not a Gen Y thing.
  
  Continue Reading: “Bad bosses, lazy Yers, and everything in between”

If there’s one thing twentysomethings these days aren’t interested in doing, it’s spending an entire career at one company. Many of us aren’t even willing to spend our careers reporting to other people, whatever the company. Which explains all the talk about entrepreneurship. Get together a few ambitious twentysomething corporate Americans, and it won’t be long before somebody steers the conversation toward the side hustle. Seems like everybody’s got one, and these risky fledgling (and sometimes ill-fated) projects are often what really keep young businesspeople going in the face of the daily grind.

That’s why when I first heard about Clark University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, I thought it might be worth some exploring on The Gig. And talking to George Gendron, former editor of Inc. magazine and founder and director of the I&E program, underscored how central entrepreneurship has become. “When I was at Inc. in the early ’80s, the skills of entrepreneurship were associated with small subsets of the population—engineers in Silicon Valley, say—and now those skills are vital life-skills for everybody,” he told me.

But the academic community hasn’t exactly heeded the call. (Despite the fact that the number of new small businesses is on the rise, with 671,800 opening doors in 2005, compared with just 585,140 in 2001.) So in 2004, Gendron created the I&E program at Clark, which lets students in any major add the entrepreneurship curriculum as a minor with an eye toward starting their own businesses as a capstone project. Not only does it serve those people who’ve got great corporate jobs and want more, it also helps more footloose types (people like me!) cobble a sustainable life out of their artistic leanings.

“This is a generation whose parents told them ‘follow your passion,’” Gendron says, “but once you do, what do you actually do with it? Entrepreneurship helps answer that question, because you can marry it to theater arts or art history or whatever you’re interested in, so that ten years from now you’re doing something in that arena, not just selling financial services.”

This month, the program graduated its first class, which included Aaron O’Hearn. The 21-year-old – who calls Gendron “one of the more influential and life-changing people I’ve met” – started out as the sort of guy who took AP Art classes and frowned on would-be corporate titans. But after taking his first I&E class, he was hooked. He founded Clark’s student entrepreneurship group, Initial Advantage, in 2004, and launched the group’s first student business – Campus Book Brokerage, which raised $10,000 from student investors and ended operations after returning a 4.5% profit – with three other members the same year. Today, IA has 30 members and provides everything from mentoring to marketing services for student entrepreneurs. The group’s waiting on 501(c)3 status and plans to create a seed fund for student initiatives.