I was so psyched on my first day. I came crashing through the door like, “I’m here!” They were like, “Oh right, we forgot you were starting today.” The guy who hired me was looking at me like I was from another planet. He had me sit in a conference room, fill out a bunch of forms, and look through some binders. They kept me in that conference room for three weeks. Every time I’d beg a manager, “Put me in, coach,” they would respond, “Just sit tight. We’re not quite ready for you yet.” They kept telling me, “Relax, we’re paying you. It’s our time now.” That’s where they were wrong. That was my time. They were wasting my time.

—Millennial

In our research, we often hear about this day-one disconnection between new Millennial employees and their bosses. Millennials tell us about arriving for work excited and enthusiastic about the new challenges ahead, only to find that their feelings are not completely requited by the managers who await them in the workplace. For their part, managers often find Millennials’ day-one enthusiasm to be inconvenient at best, and sometimes downright off-putting.

A senior manager in a financial services firm told me, “They show up like they expect the top job on their first day. That’s my job. I know you are excited that this is your first day of work, so I hate to tell you, kid, that for me, this is just another Monday. So go fill out these documents for HR, then look around for work. Sometimes I’ll tell the new analysts, ‘Just start moving your arms and legs, and pretty soon you’ll be doing what everybody else is doing.’” This manager explained that his firm brings in an “incoming class” of about twenty-five new analysts, mostly brand-new college graduates, each year, but only about half of them make it past the first six months. Gee, I wonder why.

We’ve learned that hit or miss is more the rule than the exception when it comes to getting Millennials up-to-speed in today’s workplace. Maybe you could get away with that in the workplace of the past with the workforce of the past, but Millennials won’t let you get away with it. This is what a Millennial told me about her experience: “Probably ten different people told me I was too enthusiastic in my first three months here. ‘Your enthusiasm makes you seem immature,’ is what one very experienced manager told me. ‘Nobody takes you seriously until you’ve been here for three years anyway.’ Three years?! You think I’m going to wait around this place for three years until somebody takes me seriously! Not a chance. If I’m not taken seriously here, then you can be sure I won’t be working here in three years.”

Millennials want to hit the ground running, and on day one. But they don’t want to be thrust into a sink-or-swim situation either. They want to hit the ground running with lots of support and guidance every step of the way. It may be exhausting for managers, but if you don’t plug into their excitement and enthusiasm on their way in the door, you are in serious danger of turning a good hire bad.

Millennials almost always walk in the door with a spark of excitement. The question is: Do you pour water or gasoline on that spark? Here’s how you pour gasoline on the spark: grab hold of them on their way in the door (grab is a metaphor, of course) and don’t let them go.

Grab Hold of Them, and Don’t Let Them Go

We have a simple rule we teach managers in our seminars: day one is the most important day. You have to plan for Millennials’ first day of work like you plan for your kid’s birthday party. That doesn’t mean you greet them with candles and balloons and gifts and song. But you do have to greet them.

Consider the greetings the U.S. Marine Corps offer to brand-new Millennial recruits. The Marines’ have a well-known on-boarding program called boot camp. For thirteen solid weeks, they provide an all-encompassing 24/7 experience in which they take an ordinary human being and transform that person into a marine—a person with a unique set of values and a unique set of skills, a person so connected to the Marine Corps and its mission and every other marine that this person is now ready to walk into the line of fire, literally, and win battles. Now that’s what I call a greeting.

The Marines don’t pay much. Their job is hard and dan­gerous. Yet they are able to build forty thousand new Marines every year with a washout rate that is so low it can hardly be measured. Learn a lesson from the most effective employer of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds in the Western world. When you are thinking about shaping your orientation process for Millennials, think about how you can emulate the boot camp approach.

You don’t need obstacle courses and firing ranges. And you don’t need to make your newly hired employees do push-ups in the mud at 4:00 a.m. What matters is replicating the intensity, the connection to mission, the feeling of shared experience and belonging to a group, the steady learning, and the constant challenge. It’s about taking Millennials seriously on day one and every other day.

In one consulting firm I know with about a hundred employees and very limited training resources, here’s what they do with the four or five Millennials they hire each year. From the moment an applicant accepts an offer of employment, that person is assigned to three experienced employees, called advisers, who work with the new employees from day one. Between the day the applicants accept the offer and their first day at the company, the advisers take turns staying in touch with them, are involved in setting their start date, and are expected to take responsibility for orientation and initial training. “The advisers stick to the new staff like glue,” the CEO of this firm told me. “Our goal is simple. The new staff should never be alone for one minute in the first six months if the advisers can possibly help it.”

The mistake employers often make is investing time, energy, and money in a highly engaging orientation program for Millennials and immediately afterward depositing them into a demoralizing no-support workplace. Following the intensity of the orientation program, Millennials end up being greeted in the real workplace by co-workers and managers with the same, “We forgot you were coming,” “Cool your jets,” and “Start moving your arms and legs” messages. No matter how long and intense (or how short and mundane) your orientation process is, you cannot ever let Millennials alone to sink or swim. The longer you sustain the intensity and support, the more value you will get out of your Millennial employees. The consulting firm CEO told me: “There are supposed to be three advisers, but usually one of the advisers will really own a new staff person and carry a disproportionate amount of the weight. But they are the smart ones because this is a small organization, and it gives them their own power base. They have these die-hard dedicated protégés who always want to work on their projects and these protégés break their backs for their advisers.”

Low Tech: Train Them One Task at a Time

Millennials, especially the best and brightest, are eager to hit the ground running and take on more and more challenges and responsibility. This is what a Millennial recently told me: “You want me to be really into this job, right? You want me to love it? Then make it lovable. I’m not going to be all fired up about doing the same thing day after day. Give me a challenge. Give me a chance to do something bigger and better. I’m willing to work my ass off. But give me something I can be fired up about.”

This kind of enthusiasm and desire to take on challenges is extremely valuable, but it also puts a huge amount of pressure on Millennials’ immediate supervisors. The senior manager in the buying organization of a large retail chain shared this experience: “One of my direct reports always tells me, ‘I’ve done that before,’ as if that is a good reason for me to give her a different assignment. ‘I am giving you this assignment, because you know how to do it,’ I say. But I know what she really means is that she is not feeling challenged. She’ll work more than most of the people around here. If I am going to take advantage of her willingness to take on these new challenges, I have to find the time to teach her. I can’t just give her a new challenge and say, ‘Go for it.’”

Millennials, especially the most capable and ambitious among them, push hard for more significant roles with increased responsibilities at much earlier stages in their careers than new young workers of generations past. It’s not just misplaced arrogance on their part, but rather a result of their natural adaptation to the information environment. The nature of professional learning today is a continuous just-in-time all-the-time endeavor. Millennials have never known it any other way. That’s why they are always in a hurry to advance to the next skill set or the next task, responsibility, or project—even when they seem clearly not ready from your perspective.

Listen to one engineering group leader in a nuclear weapons research laboratory: “They want to step into bigger roles much sooner than they are ready. They look at me playing this role and they think ‘Yeah, I could do that.’ But they don’t realize how much there is to this role, how many different responsibilities are involved, and what expertise and experience are necessary to handle all those responsibilities.” From the standpoint of many managers, of course, each new task, responsibility, and project Millennials want to take on looks like a huge bundle of best practices and standard operating procedures to learn, pitfalls to avoid, resources to command, and judgment calls to be made. Managers tell me all the time: “In our line of work, it’s especially challenging to give inexperienced young people significant responsibilities. Perhaps a new young person could learn the knowledge and skill necessary to do one of these tasks and responsibilities, or two, or three, or four. But the role they want is too complex to hand over in its entirety to someone without several years of experience.” I promise you, I’ve been told that by leaders in supermarkets and nuclear weapons labs alike—and everybody in between. We call this the “meaningful roles problem.”

The simple fact is that, if it takes you months or years to get Millennials up-to-speed and into meaningful roles on your team, then you’ll have serious problems keeping high-potential Millennials engaged and growing. Don’t tell me you are struggling to manage and retain the best Millennials and then tell me it’s going to take months or years before they can do important work that allows their co-workers and bosses to take them seriously.

How can you handle this conundrum? You may have to unbundle complex roles and then rebuild them one tiny piece at a time. You can give Millennials meaningful work at early stages in their tenure if you commit to teaching and transferring to them one small task or responsibility at a time.

Here is a great example that the same engineering group leader from that nuclear weapons research laboratory shared with me: “I learned from the mechanics here who are short-staffed. They teach new mechanics to do one simple task very well. Then, after the new mechanics do that task for a few days, they add another simple task, and so on. After a few weeks, the new mechanics have a dozen things they can do pretty well, and they are full-fledged members of the team, but with a much smaller repertoire. The really ambitious ones keep adding one skill after another and build pretty big repertoires within a few months. So I decided to do that with my new project engineers. I give them one tiny little piece of the project. I’ll sit with them and teach, then let them have a tiny little piece of work. When they get that tiny little piece of work done, I’ll teach them another piece. And another. It is very effective with the new young engineers. They actually like it this way. They are doing less, but they feel like they are doing more.”

It may be very high-tech work they are doing in that nuclear weapons lab, but this is low-tech training at its best. Remember that Millennials want to learn from people, not just from computers. If you are willing to be the teacher, you can support Millennials in their desire to acquire the ability to learn new things very quickly. You can train them the old-fashioned way in short-term stages that track directly with adjustments in their day-to-day responsibilities. Every new task turns into a proving ground, which enables them to demonstrate proficiency and earn more responsibility right away. I realize this approach to training Millennials requires a high degree of engagement and ongoing teaching and managing. But that’s how you can keep Millennials growing fast over the first, and the second, and the third year. Who knows? You might even be able to help them gain depth and wisdom way beyond their years.

High Tech: Don’t Fight Their Desire for the Latest and Greatest Information Technology

So often I go into an organization that is trying to retool its training practices to suit what they think Millennials want and need. “The latest and greatest technology,” said one training leader in a major international consumer products company. “We are making all the ongoing training just in time. Everything is going to be a computer game.”

Here’s the good news: you do not have to turn everything (or anything really) into a computer game to plug into Millennials’ learning needs. But you really should make the effort to get them the technology they are so comfortable and adept at using.

There is so much information produced in a day in any area of expertise that Millennials’ default presumption is that nobody could possibly learn all that information, even after studying for one hundred years. Given the pace of change, information becomes obsolete so fast that it seems less important how much you know or have known, and more important how quickly you can learn new things and put them into action. As one Millennial put it: “Gotta keep learning. Gotta keep moving. All the stuff you’ve forgotten, I’ll never have to know. Half the stuff you remember, I’ll never have to know. That just means I’m way past halfway to catching up to you. It’s the obsolescence curve getting steeper and steeper. It makes it a whole lot easier for a guy my age to catch up to the more experienced people.”

Yes, Millennials want the latest and greatest technology. But it’s not just a desire for the coolest toy. It’s like breathing. It’s their connection to the larger information environment. For Millennials, the information technology imperatives are simple:

• Constant connectivity with whomever they want;
• Immediate access to whatever information they want;
• Total customization of their information environment; and
• The ability to learn from and collaborate with experts in real time.

Millennials have high expectations that their employers will provide them with the latest and greatest technology, and they complain bitterly when they don’t have the tools they expect.

What Millennials want from technology-based learning is not depth and wisdom, but rather to fill skill and knowledge gaps that slow them down in their daily work. One Millennial told me: “I laid out some cash of my own to get the handheld I need to be effective. I have tried to get reimbursed, and I’ll keep trying. But the thing is, I can do my job so much better and so much easier with the hardware I bought myself that it’s worth it even if they never pay up.”

They know what’s out there, and they want to be able to use it. Millennials want to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it, not because they are lazy and not because they have short attention spans. To them, web-based search technology, online resources, social networking, and wiki tools are everyday tools like the telephone. When you tell them that they won’t have access to those tools to fill skill and knowledge gaps all day long, it’s like you are telling them to work in the Stone Age. Imagine if someone told you in the early 1990s that you would have to use carbon paper to keep copies of your documents. That’s what it sounds like when you tell Millennials you don’t want them to use the tools available to them.

Here’s a story I was told by several people at a large insurance company. It seems that a young hotshot Millennial in the marketing department, I’ll call him Barry, had been given a temporary assignment for several months—and a handheld device to use during this assignment. But when the temporary assignment ended, Barry was asked to turn in his handheld device. Hoping that the whole thing would be forgotten in such a large company and that he would be left with his treasured handheld device, Barry ignored those requests. Not long after, Barry found himself in a meeting with his boss and several senior managers (all of them armed with handheld devices because of their senior positions). At some point, an important question came up before the group that fell into the purview of Barry’s boss, who demurred, saying he would have to look up the answer after the meeting and get back to everybody. Meanwhile, Barry began researching the question in earnest, tapping away on his handheld device. Before the meeting ended, Barry raised his hand and offered a detailed answer to the important question that had been put to his boss. As one person in attendance at the meeting said, “We were all very impressed. Suffice to say, we decided that Barry could keep that handheld device.”

This is the Millennials’ information environment. With search engines and menu-driven information systems, anyone can find multiple answers from multiple sources to answer any question in a heartbeat. Shared work product libraries take typical search technology to a whole new level by providing instant quality vetting. With access to a shared work product library, employees can avoid reinventing the wheel by accessing past high-quality work product, which can be tapped for quick learning as well as lifted and reused to jump-start similar projects. Wiki technology is the ultimate collaboration facilitator by enabling different individuals to contribute to a work product from remote locations on their own time. Social networking allows anyone to build mutually rewarding relationships with people of similar interests—inside the company or outside—regardless of geography or other boundaries. Instant messaging means anyone can ask anyone he “knows” anything at any time. Imagine a mind-set in which these tools—and the corresponding connectivity, immediacy, constant access, and total customization—are taken for granted. The only question is: What are you doing to facilitate Millennials’ use of these tools to increase their effectiveness at work?

Put the tools in their hands, and watch them fill one tiny information gap at a time in real time. This is the high-tech analogue to learning one task at a time. With access to the technology they know and love, Millennials will fine-tune and nuance their on-the-job learning in ways that might shock and delight you.

Turn Every Employee into a Knowledge Worker

Especially when they are new on the job, Millennials are eager to identify problems that nobody else has identified and solve problems that nobody else has solved. They want to improve what’s already there, and they want to invent new things. One Millennial told me: “Before I even started my job, I did research on our competitors, took notes, tried to learn as much as I could. I was coming in with an outside perspective and with a different outlook from the people who have been there for a long time. I wanted to make a difference there. My feeling was they would welcome the new blood. But when I got there, I felt like all of my ideas were getting shot down. My boss would roll her eyes every time I spoke up in a team meeting, like she just didn’t want to hear from me. After a while, it was hard to really care any more.”

That eagerness to add value can be very good for business, but it can also be a frustrating distraction for managers. A manager at a beverage distribution warehouse gave me this example: “I’ve got this one kid, very smart [whom] I hired to unload trucks. On his first day, he came into my office with a list of all these things we are doing wrong. I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, great. Now go unload that truck.’ I’m glad he is interested in the business and is paying attention to the operation. I’m glad he cares. But most of the people who work here need to move boxes. Lately, when I’m hiring the young guys, I will pass over the ones who seem too smart because not everyone can be an ideas guy here.”

Managers often divide their employees—either explicitly or implicitly—into two categories: those who are knowledge workers, or “idea guys,” and those who are not. Employees with higher levels of education and responsibility for higher-level tasks are often accorded the status of knowledge workers, while those with lower levels of education and responsibility for lower-level tasks are not. I think this is a big mistake and, unfortunately, a very common one. Sometimes I spend hours trying to get leaders and managers to see that everybody today in a successful organization must be a knowledge worker.

Knowledge work is not about what you do but about how you do whatever it is you do. If you work hard to leverage information, technique, and ideas in your job, then you are a knowledge worker—at least in my world. If you don’t leverage skill and knowledge in your work to do a better job, you are going to be useless. That’s true whether you are digging a ditch or designing the foundation of the building that is going to be built in that ditch.

Most Millennials understand this on a gut level and won’t have it any other way. The real challenge is to keep them focused on all that work you hired them to do while simultaneously encouraging them to leverage knowledge and skill in that work. The more you encourage Millennials to think about their work—whatever that work might be—the more engaged they will be. The more you encourage them to learn while they work, the better they will do their jobs. Whether it’s high-tech learning or low-tech, help them channel their learning directly into their work instead of shooting down their ideas and dampening their enthusiasm. If you hire someone to unload boxes from a truck and that person wants to be an ideas guy, you need to help that individual to focus his thinking and learning on how to better unload boxes from the truck. If you hire someone to dig a ditch, help that individual to focus on how to dig that ditch better. And so on.

“As soon as they walk in the door, I get them to make an individualized learning plan and keep a learning journal,” said a smart manager in a large pharmaceutical company. “They map out their responsibilities, and for each responsibility, I ask them to make a list of learning resources. Those resources can be books, people, websites, or really anything else. That alone has yielded some really impressive results. Once they’ve made that plan, I require them to set learning goals for themselves directly related to their specific responsibilities and journal their learning efforts, how they’ve tapped each learning resource, what they’ve learned, and how they’ve used that to improve their performance.”

Does this approach work? “They love it,” the manager told me. “They get really creative with their learning plans and really get into those journals. I think it improves their performance. The ones who get into it tend to be the most successful—not just working for me, but after they move on.” She explained that this approach has particularly helped those trainees—knowledge workers, by any definition—who were always bursting with ideas, suggestions for changes, and improvements for their own responsibilities and those of others. Rather than becoming frustrated by their enthusiasm, this manager chose to channel it: “I started encouraging them to also keep track of their good ideas: ‘When you have an idea, write it down, sit on it for a couple of weeks, and then revisit it. If it still looks like a good idea to you, think about what it might take to implement it. Do a little research; then make a quick project plan.’ This way they are not throwing at us every idea that pops into their heads. I’m taking their ideas seriously, so they take them more seriously. And don’t write them off too quickly, because sometimes they come up with great ideas.”

When they come in the door, Millennials want to hit the ground running. By training them one task a time, giving them the technology tools they need to be fast and efficient, and helping them focus their energy and ideas on the tasks at hand, you’ll be able to plug into their enthusiasm and keep their excitement going past their first day at the job.