Time perception as an essential element in the career habitus design for Millennials

Abstract

The article examines the Millennials’ career habitus using narrative online interviews. In the course of the work, it was revealed that millennials have a unique sense of social time affecting the generation’s career habitus design, which is the system of orientation for constructing life directions. Millennials are characterized by deep engagement in time, perceived as a non-linear process due to the formation of uncertainty and chaos caused by the movement of capital after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the VUCA world (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), and the digital society. Millennials use time as a flexible, chaotic, and nonlinear structure and become reformers in terms of career, professional, and life planning. This characterizes the reactive potential of a generation capable of changing social structures. Awareness of the Millennial generation’s career habitus helps building effective management paradigm for young specialists in the public service. The article describes the habitus design that implies freedom from the paradigm of time as a linear, cyclical, structured process. It creates new horizons for training the future public managers capable of forming their knowledge system with a unique, flexible structure that includes constantly updated social experience. The need for constant movement can be used to motivate civil servants. In practice, it is necessary to create opportunities for learning and sharing knowledge and experience. We should develop new working formats that imply dividing personnel into small agile groups to solve non-standard tasks, which gives a sense of meaningful contribution to the common cause.