Latino Millennials - The New Diverse Workforce: Challenges and Opportunities

There are a variety of trends that are enabling and forcing organizational change. A crucial trend that has implications for a changing and growing demographic workforce includes Millennials and in particular Latinos/Hispanics as the world and particularly the U.S. workplace continues to have an increased aging workforce. Yet, while Latinos are members of the largest and also the fastest growing minority group in the United States, they are disproportionately underrepresented in more highly compensated professional and leadership roles across corporate America. The majority of existing career development and acculturation literature in the United States has focused narrowly on Anglo-oriented acculturation as a linear process. Unfortunately, as society has evolved so has the form of prejudices and biases. This is supported by the fact that well more than 50% of Hispanics experience discrimination through a variety of means including micro-aggressions. We believe that developing and maintaining an overlapping and compatible bicultural identity might not be enough and that we need to rethink what acculturation and biculturalism means for millennials and broaden our thinking to include cosmopolitanism as more encompassing of the millennials and their place in the world. We believe this article begins the dialogue for more research into this growing part of the U.S. workforce along with practical implications and applications.