Whats Next Gen X

Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career you want

Three twenty-something young adults, working at low-paying, no-future jobs, tell one another modern tales of love and death.

You're a member of Generation X-the 30-to-44 age cohort. And you've drawn the short stick when it comes to work. The economy has been stacked against you from the beginning. Worse, you're sandwiched between Boomers (with their constant back-patting blather and refusal to retire) and Gen Y's (with their relentless confidence and demands for attention). You're stuck in the middle-of your life and between two huge generations that dote on each other. But you can move forward in your career. In What's Next, Gen X? Tamara Erickson shows how. She explains the forces affecting attitudes and behaviors in each generation-Boomer, X, and Y-so you can start relating more productively with bosses, peers, and employees. Erickson then assesses Gen X's progress in life so far and analyzes the implications of organizational and technological changes for your professional future. She lays out a powerful framework for shaping a satisfying, meaningful career, revealing how to: -Identify work that matches what you care most about -Succeed in a corporate career or an entrepreneurial venture -Spot and seize newly emerging professional opportunities -Use your unique capabilities to become an effective leader Provocative and engaging, What's Next, Gen X? helps you break free from the middle and chart a fulfilling course for the years ahead.

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

"Our newest generation, Generation Z, or Zoomers, are coming of age in a world rife with amazing new opportunities and unprecedented challenges. Born around the time the World Wide Web made its public debut in 1995, they are "digital natives," the first generation never to know the world without the Internet. They have grown up alongside powerful global networks that offer endless information and connectivity. They have also had the clear realization that their elders know no better than they do how to navigate ongoing crises; that they and their planet have been badly betrayed by decisions which preceded them. In Gen Z, Explained, a team of social scientists set out to take a comprehensive look at this generation, drawing on wide and lively interviews, surveys, and comprehensive linguistic analysis (deploying the authors' proprietary iGen Corpus, a 70-million word collection of Gen-Z-specific English language scraped from social media, time-aligned video transcriptions, and memes). It paints a portrait of an extraordinarily challenged, thoughtful, and promising generation--while sounding a warning to their elders. The authors show that despite all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties they face, this generation continues to be idealistic about the future and highly motivated to make change"--

Computer games, the Internet, and other new communications media are often seen to pose threats and dangers to young people, but they also provide new opportunities for creativity and self-determination. As we start to look beyond the immediate hopes and fears that new technologies often provoke, there is a growing need for in-depth empirical research. Digital Generations presents a range of exciting and challenging new work on children, young people, and new digital media. The book is organized around four key themes: Play and Gaming, The Internet, Identities and Communities Online, and Learning and Education. The book brings together researchers from a range of academic disciplines – including media and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology and education – and will be of interest to a wide readership of researchers, students, practitioners in digital media, and educators.

Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.

"Based on more than a decade of research, The ABC of XYZ is designed for educators, business managers and parents who want a short and lively introduction to Australia's living generations. The book explores what a generation is, how its definition has changed over the years, and the trends that are emerging for the future. It examines generational conflicts in the school, home and workplace, and the ways in which they can be understood and resolved, and what might be beyond Z. Written by one of Australia's foremost social researchers, this revised edition of The ABC of XYZ reveals the truth behind the labels and is essential reading for anyone interested in how our current generations live, learn and work."--Cover.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9