Musings About High School Career Day and a Career in Social Media

I'm one of those people who can get pretty excited talking about a topic I'm passionate (and knowledgeable) about.  And if you ask me questions? I'm over-the-moon happy when I'm interacting with an engaged audience. The power and excitement of social media happens to be one of those topics. (Volunteering, social good, animals, and books are also on that list. :-))

Social media training is a part of my job that I truly enjoy; I've trained 200+ colleagues and coached several executives in the last year and a half. So for someone like me, being invited to talk about my career at a local high school's Career Day is fun. Really fun. And because social media is a topic that interests many people, including high school students, I'm guaranteed an interested audience.

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"#Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake"

Presenting my material three times in a row on Career Day at Cupertino High School enabled me to tweek  my presentation on the fly for the next audience — including moving the #Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake video from the end of the presentation to the middle, since I ran out of time and didn't get to show it for the first session. (It's one of my favorite clips, and I laugh every time I watch it.)

Generation Z, our current high school students, are smart, passionate people and digital natives who've never known a time without either socially sharing their lives, or having them shared for them by their parents. A 2013 Pew study confirms this social media saturation, "Eight in ten online teens now use social media sites."

So I was not surprised that the majority of these digital natives had seen the Ellen DeGeneres 2014 Oscar selfie, but only about half were familiar with the 2013 Superbowl Oreo tweet. And every student in each of those three classes had either participated in an Ice Bucket Challenge or had a good friend or family member who had participated in the challenge.

Generation Z is going to be joining the workforce very soon. Millennials are changing the face of the workforce to meet their needs, and I think we'll see another significant workforce engagement change when we start working with the Gen Zers. I for one, am looking forward to it.