My Job: Rosie Ernst, National Director, Genesis 10 Associates Program.

By Laura french • jobslink@startribune.com

After a career in consulting, Rosie Ernst moved into a new role two years ago, helping to prepare recent college graduates for their first consulting assignments.

One of the reasons for her career move was her daughter, now age 15 — "my own little millennial," Ernst said. "I decided I needed to get off the road."

In the G10 Associates Program (GAP), "We give associates a block of training before they set foot on the client site," Ernst said. "Half of it is a mock project. The other half is what the workplace is like — organizational structure, how to handle conflict, communications, how to network.

"We assign them a delivery director who is their coach. It's a very structured process for the first six to 12 months. When the associate gets hired in, we transition the managing."

Born in New Zealand, one of five children, Ernst found a program that helped her pay for her accounting degree by doing four years of government work afterward. Her last assignment was an information technology project. "I was working on a data model. Information engineering just fascinated me. It wasn't reporting the past like accounting — you're designing for the future. The accounting stuff just paled by comparison," she said.

She soon took a job with the American consulting company that had managed the project. As a consultant, she was involved in a number of projects in the Twin Cities, and friends referred her to the GAP position with Genesis 10.

Their knowledge of technology is astonishing. They started as babies with a Blackberry or computer in front of them. Also they like learning new things and showing that they can do things. They're a lot more collaborative than the prior generation was — there's less resistance to working with people of their parents' and grandparents' generation. Race, creed and color — they don't even notice. They're so used to it.

This generation got raised in a way that gave them quite a sense of entitlement. We did some things with the way we constantly rewarded them for effort. We've got to introduce parity — "You've got to wait your turn." Kids in gymnastics or martial arts are used to that — those same rules exist. There are a lot more millennials who have not had that.