Mark Babbitt is the founder and CEO of YouTern – an online service dedicated to matching the best young talent to leading companies through internships.  Check out their blog The Savvy Intern for more great advice on landing  and maximizing your next internship. You can find Mark on Twitter as @MarkYouTern

Gen Y is painfully aware of workforce reality.

The economy still sucks. The job search process has never been more difficult. Student loan debt has reached record levels. Gen Y, having seen promises made and broken by preceding generations, now recognizes that quick fixes do not exist.

As they consider this seemingly bleak future, many within Gen Y are also becoming aware of the following facts… and are using them to their distinct advantage:

• 90% of all direct-from-college hires will go to those with internship experience (Gardner, Chao, & Hurst)
• Start-ups, change-oriented non-profits and entrepreneurs are creating jobs at a strong pace (Kaufman Foundation)
• Nearly 70% of those who intern are offered full-time employment (NACE)
• Those who have held an intern position are more likely to garner a higher salary (NACE via JobWeb)

What Gen Y as a whole perhaps hasn’t yet realized, or at least hasn’t formalized, is that this new chain of reality forms the basis of a “Gen Y corporate ladder” – a unique-to-Millennials career development process that greatly increases their chances of getting desirable jobs at graduation, in the challenging times and beyond.

Clearly, Gen Y isn’t the only birth generation suffering the current economy. Their parents – perhaps convinced by their own parents – learned to be good employees and work for the same company for decades. Searching for some sort of security, many joined labor unions. Others strove for residency or tenure within their professions. Almost all were willing to start at the very bottom of their generation’s corporate ladder.

Decades later and in the middle of our prolonged recession, these Boomers revert to what they know best: get another job. Today, many are working at McDonalds, Wal-Mart or Home Depot. Gen X follows closely in their footsteps, and now will have to remain in the workforce much longer to afford retirement.

Millennials, on the other hand, are creating options for themselves. Despite everything we often hear to the contrary… Gen Y is the generation still under control.

Why?

Perhaps unwittingly – and most certainly out of necessity – many members of Gen Y are developing a plan:

1)     Early in their college career, Gen Y is securing relevant internships and volunteering for service organizations

2)     They deliberately work and learn within sectors projected to be hiring at graduation

3)     They build personal relationships with their employer-mentors, emphasizing a solid work ethic, energy, passion, and results

4)     They ask for a wage commensurate with their experience (and the results they’ve already achieved)

Add personal branding and strong networking – particularly through social media – and the members of Gen Y just now entering the workforce may never feel the effects of our poor economy.

This is not a magic bean, or a get-rich-quick scheme for the Trophy Generation. These steps are not the easy way out (quite the opposite). Perhaps born from the “entitlement” issue that keeps rearing its bipolar head, this is an attitude specific to Gen Y: “we deserve a good career, and we’re going to find a way to make it happen.”

Gen Y, as a whole, may not understand the significance of this achievement. Many within their own ranks don’t yet know that this “Job Search 2.0” is already a repeatable, scalable success mechanism.

They will… and when they do, they’ll text and tweet it until their fingers bleed.