Empowering First-Generation Employees: Emory Innovators with Dr. Andrea Dittmann

How do the unique experiences of first-generation college students become strengths that they can leverage in their first jobs?

The Hatchery invited Dr. Andrea Dittmann to a special episode of Emory Innovators to speak with us about her fascinating research on first generation college students entering the workforce.

Dr. Dittmann is an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. She earned her PhD in Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Dr. Dittmann’s research has been published in journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Her work has been featured in the business and popular press, including Harvard Business Review, Politico, and the Christian Science Monitor. I’m the author of Psychology Today’s Inequality Interrupted blog, and also contributes to the Behavioral Scientist.

Andrea’s curiosity about social class gaps began the summer after her sophomore year of college. While she was working as a research assistant and a waitress, she noticed that our society rewards one type of position over the other. This “cultural mismatch”, as she called it, was what led her to the research that became her dissertation on overcoming social class gaps.

The conversation on this podcast centers around the cultural differences and strengths that first generation college students bring to their companies after college. Rather than thinking about how to make first-generation college students like everyone else, Andrea is interested in the strengths that they bring to their first jobs, and how employers can unlock those strengths for the benefit of the employee and for the organization.

One of the skills that surfaced for Andrea was the “ability to make the best of things” as compared to middle and upper-class backgrounds and the way that makes students more resourceful. Traits like creativity and resilience also came up as strengths.

Another feature of Andrea’s approach that makes it unique is that she is finding ways that organizations and employers can unlock everything that first-generation employees can offer. One tip Andrea gives is asking more inclusive and open questions in interviews. They can also structure teams differently to maximize success for their employees. She said that first-generation individuals tend to be more interdependent, so a collective approach yields better results.

To hear more from Dr. Andrea Dittman, you can listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify. To stay up to date on everything happening at The Hatchery, you can subscribe to our newsletter.