Around 30,000 years ago, more or less, a tribal council of Cro-Magnon men (and women) likely met in a large cave to debate the problems of the day which were:

• Climate change: When is this Ice Age going to end? And who started it?
• Education: Young people today have no interest in learning to be good hunter-gatherers. They just want to sit around and bang sticks on rocks, grunting mindlessly.
• Government Brain Drain It is increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best and brightest to make a career in the public service. Young people like to move around or say council work isn’t challenging enough.

Fast forward to today. Not much has changed.

Sure the Ice Age is gone. But now our coastlines and crops are threatened by climate change aka global warming. Polar bears have nowhere to go and nothing to eat. Young people still like crazy music and the government is again having problems getting and keeping young people, i.e. millennials

Millennials are people born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s. They make up about 16 percent of the total federal workforce.

Millennials (or Gen Y) are the fast-moving, high-tech, gamer generation that Uncle Sam wants and needs to augment the government’s rapidly aging, retirement-bound workforce.

Susan Fallon, an expert on the M-generation, says the government needs to do a number of things to attract and retain them. She’s vice president for Global Strategy and Business Development, Monster Government Solutions.

Fallon says just getting a good, steady job is no longer the goal of many young people. She says federal agencies need to go after them, offer them interesting work, and give them a career path, not just a GS rating.

So who are the millennials, and why and how should the government court them? Coming out of a deep recession, shouldn’t they be grateful for a job — period? We’ll talk about it today on our Your Turn radio show. Because of budget restraints, the huge retirement-eligible population and changing agency needs, Fallon says Uncle Sam has to get his act together. She’ll be our guest at 10 a.m. EDT here at www.federalnewsradio.com today. One of these days a millennial may be your boss, or decide how much your Social Security benefit, or tax refund, will be!!

Also on the show Federal Times Andy Medici will bring us up to speed on the House and Senate budgets, and the likelihood that the federal retirement program make take some hits this year.

Nearly Useless Factoid by Michael O’Connell

German-born actor Eric Braeden was originally hired in 1980 to play the character of Victor Newman on the CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless” for only eight to 12 weeks. Thirty-five years later, he is still playing that character on the show.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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