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Much has been written about generational differences, with emphasis on each generation’s relative strengths and weaknesses. A Business Insider article examines the results from an EY study, where 1200 professionals are asked about their perceptions of the strength and weaknesses of their peers.

Some of the results matched my own perceptions, but one in particular bothers me. According to the EY study participants, Gen X’ers aren’t very tech savvy. They rank 18% vs. Millennials at 78% and Boomers at 4%. I can see why Millennials rank quite high, but we Gen X’ers were the very first early adopters.

We witnessed the technology explosion of portable music devices, gaming systems, and telecommunications. We went from listening to records to Walkman cassette players to CDs. We went from Atari to Nintendo to Sega to PlayStation. We learned Pascal in college. I had a beeper before my first cell phone and I actually typed my term papers on a 7-line display word processor. Most of us probably even remember some basic DOS commands.

While Millennials benefit from a myriad of digital capabilities via seriously sleek devices and UIs, they don’t know much about the inner workings of all this technology. I content that Gen X’ers have a deeper understanding of technology, even if we don’t use the ever expanding inventory of social channels and digital devices as frequently as our Millennial peers. Fellow Gen X’ers, I think our tech savviness is underrated. What do you think?

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor

Originally posted on The XM Files

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