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      Intellectual Growth and Challenge

      Each year during his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, Adonis Watkins interned at Lehman Brothers as an analyst, intent on a career in investment banking. With the financial meltdown of 2008, and the collapse of Lehman that same year, Watkins elected to take a detour around Wall Street, accepting an offer at a management consulting firm that advised global investment banks, asset managers, and hedge funds on their technological initiatives.

      It seemed a good fit. Most of the personnel had PhDs; many of the senior consultants had been finance executives and portfolio managers. But there was limited investment made in junior talent because, as management explained to Watkins, “You’re not driving the revenue.” Nor were career growth prospects a given. “People came to work, did their jobs, and went home,” says Watkins. “There were no conversations about professional development or career growth opportunities.”

      In 2012, hungry for development, Watkins accepted an offer to join Moody’s Analytics as an analyst. In little more than a year, he moved into a role supporting the sales team as an associate. Today, he’s a credit product specialist, managing his own sales region and targets—a goal he’d shared with management when he came on board but whose rapid attainment affirms for him he’s found the right company. “During the interview process I was asked about my short and long term career goals. I expressed my interest in pursuing a sales career and was told, ‘Perform well in this analyst role, work hard, and build your brand, and we’ll provide you with the opportunity to explore that interest,’” he says. “When my managers saw that I could take on a challenging role and perform well, they gave me the opportunity to pursue a sales career at Moody’s Analytics. This proved to me that the firm was serious about supporting my career interests and professional development.”

      What excites him is the sheer range of learning opportunities that lie before him. “It’s fairly common, and encouraged, for employees to change roles and explore new challenges within the firm. I have lots of friends who’ve not only transferred to different departments but also different locations globally including our London, Dubai, and Australia offices.” Moody’s maintains an intranet site to enable people to apply directly to internal opportunities, and has a mentor program so that, if up-and-comers like Watkins voice their ambitions, senior leader mentors can advocate for, and open doors on behalf of, their mentees. Such relationships between senior leaders and protégés—what CTI defines as sponsorship—provide high-potential talent with the high-octane support and air cover necessary to stretch their boundaries. “I told my mentor that I was interested in going to Asia for an assignment to explore that market and continue my development as a sales professional,” Watkins recounts. “That same day, he reached out to the head of sales for the Asia-Pacific region to schedule a call with me to discuss how I could make that a reality. It’s a culture that fully supports growth and opportunity.”

      An Unmet Hunger

      Watkins’s story underscores just how keenly Millennials value opportunities to learn and grow on the job. Fully 73 percent of Millennials without financial privilege say that learning new professional skills is an aspect of intellectual growth that’s important to them in their careers. Yet only 55 percent say they have this aspect of intellectual growth in their careers.

      Some of this hunger for skill building, our interviewees explain, stems from job insecurity: if you entered the job market after the crash of 2008, you are acutely aware you cannot afford to be perceived as having only one skill set or career path. “Sure, Millennials want flexibility around their roles and chances to learn new things partly because they don’t want to get bored,” says a thirty-year-old media producer. “My parents and grandparents—they spent twenty years in one role! But it’s more about layoffs than boredom for people my age. We want to develop mastery at a lot of different roles because the job market has changed drastically. We’ve seen jobs, departments, whole divisions, get phased out. The way I look at my development, you’re not going to be able to phase me out if I am proficient in a lot of roles.”

      As important as building skills, for these young professionals, is achieving expertise and mastery. A robust 69 percent of Millennials without financial privilege identify this as an important aspect of intellectual growth, as well might their employers. But again, for all its importance, employers aren’t providing it: an astounding 68 percent of Millennials without financial privilege say they simply aren’t realizing this expertise and mastery in their careers.

      Neha* used to be one of them. While working for a major US retailer, she was enrolled in a training program with the supposed goal of designing new products for the company. But the “special side projects” she was assigned to develop had no future. “They were just busy work, nothing that would ever become a real product,” she says. Worse, the training program mimicked a reality show, where managers piled on more projects to see which trainees would break first. “You couldn’t learn from your mistakes: if you made a mistake, you lost a lot of support,” she says. “Maybe they thought the reality-TV-show aspect would attract Millennials, but actually it just demoralized us. It was impossible to build more expertise in areas I already had some training in, and I did not feel like I was getting the new skills that would improve my technical or design abilities.” Today, Neha is leadership program coordinator at a nonprofit that helps low-income South Asian women and girls expand their horizons. “It’s almost a dream job for me,” she says. “My manager gave me all the tools I needed and had total faith in me. It’s that new economy mentality—give your employees space to expand their horizons, let them have mastery over something, and they will express their initiative.”

      Eager to Innovate

      Opportunities to innovate also matter to the Ninety-One Percent. More than half of them (56 percent) say that an important aspect of intellectual growth and challenge in their careers is becoming more creative and innovative. That’s something employers are acutely intent to harness, as innovation in today’s globalized economy is the key to growth. But yet again, our findings point to a glaring gap between what employers acknowledge to be a business imperative and their actual investment in addressing that imperative. Fully 69 percent of Millennials without financial privilege say they don’t have this aspect of intellectual growth in their jobs, a finding echoed by many of those we interviewed while they explained why they’d left a previous job for their current employer.

      Michele,* an account executive at an up-and-coming advertising agency, left one of advertising’s biggest firms out of frustration at being hired for her fresh ideas, only to find that creativity was welcomed only from those working in roles designated as “creative.” What appeals to her about her current employer, she says, is that even as an account person, she’s empowered to contribute her opinions or solutions at meetings reviewing creative ideas.

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