The career path at Ernst & Young LLP had been pretty consistent for years. Typically, the firm would hire students out of business schools and other places as young professionals and grow them through their careers by providing them with great opportunities, and they would, ultimately, succeed and be leaders in the firm.
“That was a model that was pretty tried and true,” says Lisa Portnoy, the San Jose office managing partner and West subarea technology leader.
In fact, that model has attracted more than 144,000 top professionals to the firm, who have collectively generated more than $21 billion in revenue.
But with a new generation of employees entering the work force, the firm’s leaders paused for a moment. They conducted a study and found that, by 2012, more than 60 percent of their client-serving personnel would be from Generation Y.
“That was a huge shift from the baby boomer generation, which was really the prevalent generation of our work force for a long time,” Portnoy says. “With that Gen Y and the ones that would follow, we needed to rethink what kinds of priorities that generation would see as important, what culture did they want to create in the work force and how do we get ahead of that. That really became a top priority for the firm around the world. We peeled it back a layer and thought about what are some of those issues.”
Gender and cultural differences had always been important to the firm, especially in this region, but it was now more than that — Portnoy and other managers now had to factor in perspective as a difference.
Portnoy recognized that her firm’s ability to continue attracting and retaining the top talent would hinge on her ability to recognize differences between generations, embrace those differences and then find ways to connect her 700 people by bridging those generational differences.
“We recognize that in our profession particularly, there’s a lot of changing demographics, and so, while the leadership may be the baby boomers, the folks that we are interacting with and ultimately are hiring are of a different generation,” Portnoy says. “We have put another priority on making sure we can be flexible to that — we can connect to different generations.”
