‘I want to move up the corporate ladder faster. I don’t like being micro-managed and am not that into facebook or twitter.’ This is the myth-busting finding from a Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) research released last week in Nairobi. According to the report, generation Y employees are generally misunderstood by HR and other senior managers.

In spite of the generation gap, the professional needs of Gen Y employees, are more or less the same as their older colleagues. The only difference is that generation Y –who are in their 20’s – want that promotion now or latest tomorrow.

The report validates recent trends associated with 20-something urban professional; ambitious, entrepreneurial and adventurous. That’s why access to social networks or flexible dressing code did not feature prominently in the research.

Instead, the 1,270 polled individuals, were more interested in career development, competitive benefits & incentives, clear work goals, challenging & interesting work and coaching & mentoring. Long, winding meetings, bureaucracy, slow-decision making process are a turn-off to the age-group.

The study was done to establish how much HR managers understood the generation. While 60 percent of the employees interviewed said they were already providing access to on-line social networks and another 37 percent consider doing the same out of the assumption that this was a desirable benefit to Gen Y, majority of the employees in this age group did not think that it was important.

They don’t feel the need to access the social networks in the office, since most of them – almost 70 percent according to another research commissioned by the ICT board – use their wap-enabled phones to get into the virtual social space.

Moreover, only 32 percent considered access to facebook and twitter at work as necessary. And what may come as a surprise to many, only nine percent throught flexible dress code was an incentive to work for a company. In contrast, 50 percent of managers interviewed thought freedom of dressing an important factor for Gen Y.

The report shows Gen X managers (those in their 30’ and 40’s) are making wrong assumptions. about the needs of generation Y. The survey also revealed that 20-something employess want to be guided and given space and resources to develop their skills. This generation is also more task-oriented, preferring to be assessed by output and productivity rather than the 8-5 pm time cap.