At the start of this new decade, I noticed something interesting: a job seeker whose resume describes him as ‘a digital native with 16 years experience’. How could that be? A digital native with that much experience? Isn’t that an oxymoron? This made me stop to think, and took me to the realization – as both recruiter and a proud participant in early new media businesses -- that we’ve entered a new chapter.
As a media executive recruiter, I’ve often trumpeted the value and impact of ‘straddlers’, versatile executives with hands-on experience in both traditional and online media businesses. This is still a group to be cultivated and whose role in reshaping integrated media businesses will continue to play out. (After all, I am in this cohort, and had I stayed on the operating side of the media industry, I feel sure I’d still be marketable!) But the dawn of the new decade is forcing me to re-think and recalibrate.
We’ve now hit the year when a 1992 college graduate with a 2-year graduate degree has crossed the 15-year career experience threshold – enough, by most standards, to be ascending into significant strategic and general management roles. Unless he or she has been living under a tree, he is by all rights classifiable as a digital native: one whose entire adult life has been lived in the digital world. He or she socializes and makes contacts through online networks, knows the rules of Twitter, believes music was always downloadable, sells and trades merchandise online, watches TV on the computer, knows the definition of a non-edible cookie, user-generates content, knew the term 'avatar' before the blockbuster movie release, and can be productive while exhibiting the split-screen, multi-tasking, attention deficit behavior common to the next generation consumer. Suddenly now it’s this group, which is reaching primetime in career terms, that qualifies to be the ‘adult supervision’.
Our protoypte Digital Native executive candidate left college and foraged into adulthood as the Internet industry exploded and experienced its growing pains. Consider these Internet businesses launched to glory or early demise between 1994 and 1996: Amazon, GeoCities, TheGlobe.com, The Mining Company (now About.com), Altavista.com, Hotmail, LookSmart, Pathfinder.com, Yahoo, NYTimes.com, People Magazine on AOL, ESPNet.Sportzone.com, Infoseek, and MTV.com, to name a few. It all really began, for the consumer Internet at least, in the mid-90s. Fifteen years ago.
The industry has learned a lot in the last 15 years. So, too, have those digital natives now looking to succeed the straddlers, and already clearly way ahead of the hapless slow-to-arrive Digital Immigrant population.
As we scroll the calendar to 2010, I look forward to working with media clients who need smart ‘Digital Natives’ to help drive further innovation in their business models -- and who will opt for a multi-tasking ‘straddler’ such as myself to help identify them!
Cara,
ReplyDeleteI'll agree that we're at a point now where digital media executives have grown up professionally in the digital media era. I think many people would place me in that category.
BUT, to the candidate with 15 years experience, I have to say you are NOT a digital native.
A digital native has been surrounded by technology since their birth.
A digital native:
- Has never embraced email. They text and, even when they get a Blackberry, they use it for bbm, not for email.
- Grew up in a global environment and doesn't think that it's particularly cool or unique to interact with people around the world. They just do it naturally.
- Thinks vinyl is old school, not something that they used to listen to music on as a kid (for them, the old stuff they used as a kid is a CD)
- Knows MTV as a channel that has reality shows, but doesn't quite understand why it was called Music Television, since they've never watched videos on it.
Digital natives are now entering the workforce. It will be interesting to see how they respond as they move into management roles. Multi-taskers extraordinaire, digital natives have, for the most part, never learned to focus all their energy at a single task.
Like me and others in the space, your candidate was an early adopter and perhaps an innovator. But a digital native? Sorry, but not the case.
Barry - Hm, you're making good points. I think we need new vernacular. Someone whose entire career path has been lived in the digital space needs a new name (this candidate would have fit that criteria!)
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