Another Look at the Youth Movement

The Washington Post's Lisa Rein takes a front-page look at the rise of the youth movement in government today, noting that the Obama administration "hopes to fill 50,000 to 60,000 entry-level jobs in the next year, the largest burst since the Kennedy era."

The piece is interesting, if a bit heavy on the generational generalizations that tend to dominate conversation about young federal employees.

Mostly this seems to be the result of ongoing Baby Boomer mystification about the youth of today. (They crave instant feedback! They love social media! They want to wear flip-flops to work!) So here's my message to the Boomers, as one permanently stuck between that generation and the ones that come after: They're not all that mysterious. In fact, they're not that much different than any other generation. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors and points of view. Yes, they're more comfortable, as a rule, with cutting-edge technology, but that's not as huge a distinction as you might think.

Meanwhile, the Post piece offers this in the way of demographic information:

Almost one in three of the 142,690 federal workers hired last year was 29 or younger, while more than one in four were between 30 and 39, a demographic that's reshaping the bureaucracy -- and creating tension and opportunity along the way.

In 10 years, about 400,000 of the 2 million federal workers will be younger than 35, government personnel experts say.

I'd be interested in seeing how those numbers compare to the demographics of the workforce today. Without knowing the historic rate of hiring of younger people, and the percentage of federal workers who are younger than 35 over time, it's hard to determine exactly how much current trends actually are "reshaping the bureaucracy."