#41 User Centric
Gen Yers crave experience. For a job to truly excite and engage an ambitious emerging professional, it's got to provide rigorous experiences on a continual basis. At User Centric, green employees are given access to big projects from the start. That kind of experience keeps employees coming back for more.
"On the third week of my job I was on a plane to meet with clients in Ohio," says Jacob Zweig, a newly hired User Experience Analyst. "[They give you] a lot of responsibility and you have to learn quickly." Zweig says that the experience was "incredible," and taught him--quickly--to be confident and direct.
A willingness to learn fast is a quality many Generation Y folks possess and it's one of the many reasons Managing Director Gavin Lew trusts them with big time projects early on. "[Gen Yers] are really smart people. Entry-level recruits get put in front of CEOs and you learn in dog years here. There are 20 projects per person per year, minimum." The skill set Generation Y inherently own contributes to their ability to handle that much of a workload in an efficient and organized manner. ""They understand the technology," says Lew. "They live it."
Due to the variety of projects User Centric takes on, employees find themselves doing something different almost every day and as a result, the experiences they get are as varied as the clients they work with. User Experience Specialist Melinda McElheny says that the variety is a huge perk. "I get to learn about different domains and all sorts of things about e-commerce sites, banking, travel, and medicine. We have many different sized clients, from Verizon and Motorola all the way down to very small non-profits."
The experiences offered extend globally, too. The firm has offices around the world and encourages employees to take on three to four month assignments abroad if they're interested. "We get to do global projects," says McElheny. "I was in Tokyo last month. That was awesome. We often attend conferences--at least one per year--and we get training and see talks from the best in the field."
