Generation Y 2.0

Benjamin Chaminade is a French-Australian specialist in Talent Management and international speaker on Generation Y. He is among the first to have worked in this subject and brought this concept in Europe 2 years ago. If at first the audience was thinking that Y was an American or Australian thing, this subject has been frequently covered by journalists ever since.

As a ‘HR Architect’ and ‘Talent Trader’ Benjamin is an author of several works on talent, recruitment 2.0 and employer branding. His eighth and latest book strong> “Managing human resources - A key element in a quality management culture” has been translated throughout the world.

Benjamin, named a ‘management trend setter’ by the Australian press, began his career as an ‘Attraction Manager at Disneyland Paris. He was very quickly thrown into managing a young multicultural team, finding out that culture and Human Resources are key to an efficient organisation.

Over the last six years, Benjamin has become well established in the HR and management fields in both France and Australia and has been observing management practices across the world on his travels. Listening to and working with Generation Y individuals and groups alike about their working life, needs, dreams and expectations. This included an extensive study involving the meeting of 10,000 individuals face-to-face, in panel discussions and focus groups, and on five continents. Some of the results of his work is often included in his presentations and case studies, which he delivers in seminars and conferences around the world.

Lynda Magee is an experienced global HR leader working in change management, performance, and talent planning across corporate and mid sized clients in both private and public sectors. She has a particular passion for looking at the best ways to maximise cooperation and effective working across the generations.

Lynda works to help prepare employers in innovative ways of working to accommodate the learning styles and motivations of the generations in order to bring true flexibility of choice. She also supports employee engagement, assessment and development work.

She has extensive international experience across the continents, having worked in the Middle East, emerging markets and Nordics most extensively. Her HR career began at Sony, following a background in science and sales, and after some years in senior HR roles she continued to work in professional services, latterly as an independent specialist. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD.

Steven Waterhouse has real grounded experience in Human Resources with a particular passion for talent acquisition and talent management and has seen the challenges that all three generations bring to managers in today’s workplace. His experiences are varied but with a slight bias to technology and media companies. Steven’s career has seen him working across most of western Europe and in his time with the Sony Corporation he spent three years based in Germany working at the heart of their European HQ.

Having ridden the Dotcom boom and bust of the early 21st centuary inside the Financial Times Group of companies - launching several online businesses - Steven then explored the world of a Not-for-Profit organisation needing a wholesale cultural revamp. In the time before going solo in 2007 Steven worked for three years with a leading global PR business as their European HRD.

Sarah Holden is an organisational consultant and executive coach with specialisms in a number of Talent Attraction, Performance, and Development areas. Sarah’s area of interest is supporting organisations’ to develop people approaches that create exceptional organisational effectiveness. She is interested in how different generations of employees relate with one another within organisations to create the exceptional performance which builds competitive advantage. Sarah is also particularly interested in how organisations need to adapt and evolve the way they are structured; how will the modern organisation need to operate in order to fulfil the needs of a wide range of individual working preferences and to leverage talent well into the next decade?

Sarah is a former South African journalist, has a BA in English and Journalism and Media Studies (Rhodes), an MA in HR Development and is finalising her MSC in Organisational Consulting (Ashridge). She is also a CIPD Chartered Member.

Morgan Rise What can I say about myself? I’m currently studying for my undergraduate degree in Politics at Swansea University, Wales. I have a large passion for writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and I see writing as being a large part of my future career, hopefully in journalism.

The Internet is something that I have grown up with and therefore I use it as a large resource for most of my studying and research. That’s the reason I go on the net, however, social network sites like Facebook took over my life from the moment I joined. Plus through spending large amounts of time on MSN and various online forums I spread my knowledge areas out further by networking with people across the globe. Globaliation, and the effect it has, is a passion of mine with the intention of focussing on it for my dissertation and potentially to take postgraduate study on this topic. I feel that in the modern world with the increased methods of communication such as the internet, broadcasted news services, the cultural and political boundaries between all peoples are diminishing. Therefore, I believe it is imperative that this be taken into account with new generations of employees. They are increasingly aware of the world around them; both nationally and internationally, and because of that they wish to keep increasing their knowledge, and to push the limits of pre-conceived boundaries of previous generations.