From the course: Working with Creative Millennials

Defining the generations and the creative nomad

From the course: Working with Creative Millennials

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Defining the generations and the creative nomad

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- The career entry point for the millennial designer looks vastly different from the one their more seasoned supervisors encountered at the beginning of their careers. Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, not sure where you fit in? Generally, here's how the generations have been defined in the United States. Baby Boomers were born between 1945 and 1965. Gen X-ers were born between 1965 and 1980, and Gen Y, or what we more commonly refer to as the Millennials, were born between 1980 and 1995. I call the millennials who work in both analog and digital creative fields, such as illustrators, designers, photographers, artists, writers and programmers, creative nomads. Why? Nomads have no fixed home and move according to the seasons from place to place, in search of food, water and grazing land. They move quickly because they're agile and mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. Today's millennials replace ancestral maps with GPS, dialects with coding, and their herds with a dog. A loyal companion that they want to take to work with them every day. Throughout this course, I'll be using the terms millennials and the subset of this generation, the creative nomads, interchangeably. Understanding what's at the heart of a creative nomad will help seasoned designers utilize millennial creativity in a more effective way. My hope is that this understanding will lead to a better appreciation of what's possible in our fast moving, creative industry.

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