How is that possible, you ask? It’s hard for myself, as a college student, to consider that college, the time of constant change, is slow. When you have two ‘homes’ when class is in session and neither feel quite right; when you never know how much homework you’ll have on a given night (or if you’ll do it); when you don’t know if said homework will keep you from sleeping all night, or if you’ll be having too much fun with your friends to fall asleep - how is this not a fast pace for change? When majors change as much as your housing and your friends change as often as your classes, thinking about ‘the real world’ shifting even more abruptly is frankly terrifying.
After thinking all of this, I took a step back and gained a bit of perspective. I took a breath and thought about change throughout my entire life. Generation Y and Generation Z have lived through a very quick cycle of changes in our roughly 20 years on Earth, and it’s happened without us blinking.
Think about it. When we were born, social media didn’t exist. Now a third of the world’s population is on some platform. Smart phones weren’t created yet. The average person now checks their phone every 9.6 minutes. Attention spans have decreased from 12 seconds on average to 8 seconds. Half of the photos ever taken have been taken in the last two years. Look at all this change! And all this just has to do with the phone in our back pocket, something our generation is very well acclimated to keeping up with. If we can keep up with all that change, and it’s pace, can’t we keep up with the pace of the real world around us?
We’ve been primped and primed for the changing job market we’ll be entering without even realizing it.
Change is an ever-constant aspect of our environment without us being conscience of it.
Because of our unique relationship to constantly changing technology, we have exposure to a rate of change that not everyone else has. There are those in the workplace that aren’t at all used to change, that aren’t accepting, maybe they just simply do not do it. They do not innovate. They want you for that. So, accept the change, and use it to your advantage.
