Greetings all and welcome to the Conversations: Enhancing 2-Way Communications blog!  The idea for this blog came from work of the Central District Program Leadership Team.  In identifying program training needs in their district, they discovered some issues that, well, didn’t really relate directly to subject matter programming but nonetheless are important and need to be addressed (for example, work/life balance and office/field time balance.).  So we (State Staff) developed this blog to promote two-way communications to talk about these issues.

We will be posting periodically and encourage you to comment (just click on Leave a reply) at the bottom of the post.  You may comment anonymously, but we would encourage you to tell us who you are.  You can also suggest additional topics either in comments or by emailing Mike Lambur (lamburmt@vt.edu).

For more information on the blog, see About.

You’ve all heard the terms: traditionalists, baby boomers, generation X, generation Y/millennials.  These represent the four generations that exist in our VCE workforce today.

So what does this really mean?  Well, the importance is that individuals from each generation bring different values to the workplace that influence how they work and how they interact with others.  A generation is based on the range of an individual’s birth date and the traits they develop in their formative years, which is influenced by economic, political, and social events happening at that time.  For a more information on this, see Understanding Generations by the West Virginia University Extension Service.  Also see The Value of a Multigenerational Workplace for a very enlightening business perspective.

From my perspective, I believe that generational diversity exists in VCE and can be challenging and also opportunistic to deal with in our professional relationships and work.  What do you think?  Here are two questions to start the discussion:

1. What have been your experiences in generational diversity in your VCE work?

2. How can we leverage generational diversity to benefit our VCE work?

Mike Lambur