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!
