The Insult That Catapulted My Career

In 2007, I did a fair amount of work with corporate executive teams on the subject of coaching their entry-level employees -- also referred to as Generation Y. I had been hired to explain the mindset of this new generation of workers and how to coach them in their careers. It was a subject I had come to care a lot about. In the year leading up to the corporate work, I had seen a dramatic increase in the number of young people coming to me for coaching. The confusion and distress over their careers was so intense, I would use the term "onset career crisis" to describe how acute the pain of early career development was for them.