I've just started doing some research for my next project, a paper for nGenera on "Blue Collar 2.0: How Next Generation Technology and NetGeneration Workers are Transforming Non-Knowledge Work Jobs and Industries," and I came across this great article from Fortune magazine from late last year. Writer Nadira Hira, who has written other good pieces on Millennial and workforce issues, goes out for a day's training with UPS. Hira aptly summarizes the ugly collision of Millennial workstyles and old-economy requirements:

For decades this company, which last year had $47.5 billion in revenue, has relied on "human engineering" - strictly timed routines, rote memorization, even uniform appearance, going so far as to mandate short hair and outlaw beards - to distinguish itself... But if there's one group that isn't down to be engineered, it's Generation Y, people who can't even be bothered to use punctuation, let alone memorize anything.

For 20-somethings wondering what brown can do for them, UPS has made a $34 million investment in a new training center, completely rethinking the way it approaches the onboarding of the youngest members of its workforce. The new facility is built on a simple premise: hands on. Rather than forcing Millennials to memorize reems of process knowledge, instructors demonstrate and walk through crititcal job-related tasks, including the battery of forbidding physical tasks demanded as part of the delivery driver's daily routine.This "kinetic learning" method is apparently as appealing to experiental-minded young workers as it is effective in turning process knowledge into muscle memory.

Finally, UPS training makes clear that even package delivery is now information-work, dependent on connectivity, data, and process. And like all information work, employers will succeed to the extent that they can make the process component as abstract and transparent to the worker as possible.