In this episode, ThinkLab interviews Amanda Schneider, president and founder of ThinkLab, and Jessica Jenkins, co-host of The Learning Objective and part of the research and development team at ThinkLab. Together, they discuss the findings of this year’s design hackathon, sharing their aha moments. They dismantle assumptions about what other generations think Gen Zers want from their workplace — and use data and interviews to uncover what Gen Zers actually want, what inspires them, and how to capture their loyalty.  

Accredited for: IDCEC | 0.5 CEU 

After listening, you will be able to: 

Analyze how Gen Z is an arrow to the future of the design industry. 

Contrast how the assumptions about Gen Z differ from what the data revealed. 

Identify the five challenge areas for connecting with Gen Z. 

Implement solutions for each of those five challenges. 

In this episode, we dig into the findings of this year’s design hackathon, which included a survey of more than 1,800 designers, as well as more than 20 hours of focus groups on these topics. 

Specifically, we focus on the following challenge areas: culture, creativity, relationships, loyalty, and learning. Each area revealed crucial ways in which Gen Zers differs from previous generations. This ranged from the practical, such as which way they prefer to communicate (no calls, please!) to the more profound: Gen Zers consider both physical and digital to be part of one unbroken experience, instead of two distinct and separate ways to work. Alongside these insights, Schneider and Jenkins describe concrete actions that firms can take to integrate Gen Zers and take advantage of their fresh perspective. 

Quiz: Want CEU credit for listening? Click here to take the quiz, and earn your certificate of completion.  

How it works:   

Step 1: Listen to the episode.  

Step 2: Visit this link to take a short, 5-question quiz.  

Step 3: Upon passing the quiz, receive your certificate of completion. Look out for this at the end of the quiz. 

Step 4: No need to self-report, the provider of this episode will do so for you.

A huge thank you to our Design Hackathon CEU partners who made this episode possible: Mannington, 3form, Allsteel, Material Bank, and Milliken. 

Visit here if you want them to bring these insights directly to your firm or if you want to take the digital on-demand CEU course.  

Connect with our expert guests on LinkedIn: 

Amanda Schneider 

Jessica Jenkins 

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