Núria Vilanova , founder and president of the communications consultancy ATREVIA, and Iñaki Ortega, director of Deusto Business School, yesterday presented the book Generation Z: Everything you need to know about the young people who have made millennials old at El Corte Inglés de Castellana in Madrid, accompanied by the CEO of Retail at El Corte Inglés, Víctor del Pozo, and the president of Mapfre, Antonio Huertas. The book is a guide to understanding who these young people are and what sets them apart from previous generations.
How do young people who have been born into the digital age relate to each other? What concerns do they have? How do they see their future and what skills do they have? How are they different from other generations and why is this leap not comparable to previous ones? These are some of the questions that this book has attempted to answer, with the collaboration of Dolors Montserrat, Minister of Health, Social Services and Equality, and Antonio Huertas, president of Mapfre. The presentation was also attended by Begoña Sese, Generation Z and CEO for a month at Adecco, and Jordi Nadal, editor of the book and founder of Plataforma Editorial.
Generation Z is made up of those born after 1994, who number almost 8 million according to Spanish statistics and account for more than 25% of the world's population. They no longer straddle the line between analog and digital like their older siblings, the millennials, but are 100% digital because they have been educated and socialized with the fully developed internet.
The generation of i's
The book, which compiles some of the conclusions of the quantitative and qualitative south africa phone number developed by ATREVIA and Deusto Business School –Generation Z: The Dilemma–, details in depth the main characteristics of young Z people: digital, entrepreneurial, committed, brand-oriented and nonconformist.
“They are starting to leave university to enter the workforce and claim their place in the world. They are the first generation to have incorporated the Internet in the earliest stages of their learning and socialisation , and also the one whose personality has been most directly marked by the crisis. Thanks to the democratisation of the Internet, they have powerful tools at their disposal to change their environment or the destiny to which they are destined” explained Núria Vilanova.
But if there is one thing that defines this generation, it is the so-called 4 Is, which, along with the Internet, are: irreverence, inclusion, immediacy and uncertainty. As Iñaki Ortega said, “they are irreverent because they do not hesitate to contradict their parents, teachers or elders, among other things because they have been self-taught. Immediacy like the social networks they frequent where everything is fast and fleeting. The collaborative economy and the diversity they embrace makes them inclusive. The liquid world in which they were born, in the words of the philosopher Bauman, where nothing is stable and everything changes, makes uncertainty their companion since they were born in the midst of a global crisis.”
The speed at which they live makes even the Spanish political situation, which is going through periods of change, seem to them to be suffering from a lack of mobility. For 76% of the Zs interviewed in the study, Spain is currently in a situation of “stagnation”. They are interested in politics and exercise their right to vote, something that is demonstrated by the participation rate of young Zs over 18 years of age in the last elections, which – at 78% – far exceeded the national average. These figures confirm the erosion of the credibility of the political system among the youngest sectors. The political class faces the challenge of connecting with this new generation, which generally shows what is called “political disaffection”.