Who are Generation Z?

The next generation is already rising.

It’s hard to believe, but Generation X, those of us who now range in age from our mid-30s to mid-50s and once derisively known as “slackers,” are almost firmly ensconced in middle age. Generation Y, or Millenials, are today’s young adults, and they’ve been studied and written about almost as much as our aging Baby Boomers, most famously by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who coined their name in the book, Millennials Rising.

Generation Z, though, has been a mystery to almost everyone except their parents and teachers—until now.

In September and October of this year, Adobe surveyed more than 1,000 Generation Z students between the ages of 11-17, and more than 400 teachers with Generation Z kids as their students. The results are fascinating.

You can read the entire study yourself—the team here at reddbug helped develop the infographic and microsite—but here are the key insights.

Insight 1: This first one isn’t surprising—both students and teachers believe that Generation Z’s defining characteristic is that they’ve all grown up in the age of technology. These kids have never known a world without high-speed Internet, smartphones, social media and on-demand streaming video.

They think of regular old email the way Xers used to look at black-and-white television. It gets the job done, they suppose, but it’s not particularly interesting.

The upside is they think they’re more creative than older generations and have more passion “for making things better and smarter.” The downside may be that technology is so integral to their experience that, as one teacher said, “it can become a hindrance for them to think without it.”

Insight 2: They also say they’re excited and nervous about the future, and that they aren’t yet prepared for the “real world.” One student put it this way: “I feel unprepared due to a lack of jobs, the high cost of education, not learning important life skills after high school.”

Of course, none of us are truly ready for the real world until we’ve spent some time there. None of us are ready to be married, either, until we are, and we’re especially not ready to have our own children before they’re born. We figure it out, though—at least most of us do—and today’s kids will too.

Almost half of the students surveyed think that what they learn outside of school will be more important to their careers than what they learn at school. That will turn out to be true, too, for almost all of them, with the possible exceptions of rocket scientists and brain surgeons.

Insight 3: The overwhelming majority of both students and teachers think kids learn more by doing things and creating things than reading about them or hearing about them, and again, they’re right.

Think about it this way: you could read every book ever written about flying helicopters, but you’ll still probably crash the first time you fly one if there isn’t an instructor there helping you out.

Insight 4: Both students and teachers think creativity will be a crucial workforce skill in the future, and again, they are correct.

These kids have never known anything but the cutting edge, sure, but technology is still changing the world at a breathtaking pace, and unless a giant asteroid slams into the planet, that’s not going to change. The Generation Z cohort just isn’t old enough yet to experience the shock of the new. The tools they’ll have when they’re in the 40s, and the skills they’ll need to use them, haven’t even been imagined yet, let alone invented.

Much of what gets invented in the future—and they seem to know this instinctively—won’t just be used by them, it will be invented by them. We probably won’t have hover cars or jet packs when we older folks reach retirement age, but we’ll be able to thank Generation Z for most of the things that we will have.