First-Generation Professionals: Unique and Growing
Welcome to Baem Leadership. We’re glad you’re here!
We believe that people are our most valuable asset for the future. Across client sectors, industries, and cultures, our work focuses on empowering people to learn, grow, and reach their full potential. Ultimately, individual development fuels the success of teams, initiatives, and organizations.
Through our work with clients and our own personal experiences, Baem Leadership has been particularly focused on the challenges and strengths of First-Generation Professionals or FGPs in the workplace. They are unique, and this group is growing in both size and importance to organizations.
Who are First-Generation Professionals?
You may have heard the term “first generation” used in terms of higher education: first-generation college students.
As they graduate and enter the working world, these students become First-Generation Professionals — the first in their immediate family to acquire a college degree and enter the professional workforce. FGPs have also been labeled as “class migrants” who strive to move from the working-class roots of their families to more white-collar careers.
A simple definition on the surface but the implications are much deeper. Their professional “arrival” is about much more than a job title. For many, it is about making their families proud, repaying the sacrifices made to reach that point, becoming financially independent, and demonstrating their full potential.
It is also about their broader identities — representing their culture and heritage, showing up as their authentic self, and battling stereotypes and biases. Clearly, many complexities contribute to their first-generation identity.
What is unique about them?
As we began to dig deeper and explore the backgrounds and experiences of FGPs, it became clear that they grapple with a variety of challenges that many of us don’t consider. But they also demonstrate grit and tenacity to find creative ways to get around those obstacles and play to their strengths.
Their stories span the gamut: poor or limited guidance from mentors, tight financials, limited awareness of resources and options, lack of self-confidence, and a desire to succeed but also to simply fit in.
For those who make it to graduation, more unfamiliar challenges await: job searches, unfamiliar hiring processes, salary negotiations, business language, workplace politics, and career planning. Many discover that graduation wasn’t the end and getting a job did not equal success.
There are pivotal points in the FGP work journey where what they don’t know can, at a minimum, slow their development, or worse, destroy their aspirations and derail their advancement.
What if we did more to support FGPs?
As Baem Leadership gathered more input and insights from FGPs, we began to see common threads and common sticking points emerge.
As we considered those in the context of talent development, we began to also explore what specific actions could generate positive results for FGPs, their leaders, and their organizations.
If we know their common challenges and what missteps can be most damaging, how can we identify and implement changes that could smooth their journey, accelerate their development, enable their success — as well as deliver positive results for the business?
Simple changes to how organizations recruit, onboard, make work assignments, pair mentors, or make promotion decisions could offer benefits for FGPs. For example, with less exposure to professional workplaces, FGPs have less familiarity with expected norms of business culture and language, communication, networking, conflict management, and office politics. What if organizations incorporated those into early onboarding experiences?
Benefits that grow and multiply
We have heard from a wide range of First-Generation Professionals who have experienced varying degrees of career advancement, professional success, or financial stability. Whatever their experience, many expressed regret that they lacked early guidance.
I wish I had known how to do this earlier, but I had to figure it out for myself.
I wasted a lot of time before I found the answer.
I could have been more effective if I had known what was most important.
Another interesting note: It wasn’t until we began asking older FGPs questions about their journeys — how they navigated college, how they found their first job, how they formed a network, how long it took to get promoted — that they actually had a way to define and qualify their experiences. They acknowledged that they stayed in a job for which they were overqualified or that it took them longer to succeed or that they just simply worked on fitting in and downplaying their differences rather than trying to stand out. Looking back, most acknowledged that their journey was harder than it needed to be.
How many First-Generation Professionals are currently in your organization? Do you know how many have struggled to reach their full potential because of some of these same barriers? What unintentional barriers are existing policies and processes creating for FGPs?
What if identifying and addressing the challenges of FGPs could generate new approaches that benefit your entire organization?
What’s to come?
Let’s learn and grow together.
From this brief introduction, you have likely begun to realize that the complexities of being a First-Generation Professional are much greater than the simple definition provided earlier.
Simultaneously, the world continues to change around us. Shifting demographics, global immigration, reversal of affirmative action, and challenges to legacy college admissions all have implications for first-generation students and professionals.
We will be delving into these topics with genuine curiosity and a goal to create the best future workplaces for all.
We hope you will join us for those conversations.
Contact us to learn more.