The American workforce is becoming more and more diverse with an increasing proportion of women, person of color, and older employees. Trends in Canada and the European union are similar. Besides more diversity, two especially important and contradictory workforce characteristic and the impact of generation x or gold collar workers and the impact of poor educational preparation of some high school graduates. In fact, us. Test scores were the lowest in one comparison of 16 industrialized countries. Both characteristic present a current OB challenge but in very different way