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Oh, those fickle Generation Y workers: Raised by helicopter parents, now these coddled young adults are entering the work force and screwing up everything with their all-about-me attitudes and their impatience with quaint traditions such as working hard for promotions.

Right?

Wrong, 25-year-old Ursula Terlecki says.

"You do have to pay your dues ... I always feel like I have something to prove" says Ms. Terlecki, a publicity co-ordinator for CanWest Broadcasting. She aspires to be a full-fledged publicist one day, but says, "if I don't get promoted in the next year, it's not like I'm going to leave."

Gasp - a Gen Yer with a work ethic. And she's not alone. Plenty of workers in their early 20s beg to differ with self-proclaimed experts who have identified the "millennial" generation as one filled with self-interested job-hoppers.

Now, Ms. Terlecki and her friends have hard data to back them up. A seminar debunking the conventional wisdom about millennials, the generation born roughly between 1980 and 2000, was one of the bigger draws at last week's conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Francisco.

The message: Don't believe the millennial hype.

"It's this snowball that keeps going," says Evan Sinar, an organizational psychologist who led the session on millennial myths. Examining research from four new studies of thousands of job applicants and employees, he said, "we found the differences [between generations] weren't there, or were smaller than expected."

Perhaps the biggest misconception is that young people aren't as engaged in their work as their Generation X and baby boomer colleagues, Dr. Sinar says. On the contrary, millennial workers are just as enthused by and invested in their jobs as any other generation.

Dr. Sinar - who is, for the record, a Gen Xer - says the research suggests they're no more likely to job-hop on a whim than their older co-workers.

"I think every generation has the same people," says Monika Wilk, 26, a financial planner with Investors Group Financial Services, "the ones that, no matter what the circumstances, will be successful, and those that will jump from company to company looking for the perfect position ... but in the end not knowing themselves what they truly want."

Another myth, Dr. Sinar says, is that the younger generation demands instant gratification. This belief has prompted some companies to overhaul their application process, fearing that talented Gen Yers with stunted attention spans won't spend more than 10 minutes filling out an application.

"That wasn't what we found," Dr. Sinar says. "They were equally willing to spend the time applying to jobs as the older generations were."

Even the millennials' much ballyhooed penchant for technology is overstated, Dr. Sinar notes. The research found that while younger generations like using online tools, specifically during the hiring process, they don't necessarily have more experience than Gen Xers and even baby boomers, who are rapidly approaching technological equilibrium with their younger colleagues.

The research presented at the conference included studies from Procter & Gamble, the Florida Institute of Technology and Development Dimensions International, a talent management company where Dr. Sinar works.

The bottom line, for companies freaking out about these young whippersnappers: Relax. Or chillax, as the young folks might say. They're not all that different.

"It happens every generation," says Jennifer Deal, an organizational psychologist and author of Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young & Old Can Find Common Ground. "Some of the details change, whether it's technology or piercings or women wearing pants, which was a big deal with the baby boom generation, but the language is the same."

Instead of endlessly analyzing the supposed quirks of the younger generation, Dr. Deal suggests that employers take the radical step of treating their workers as individuals who all deserve respect, decent working conditions and opportunities to learn and grow in their jobs.

It's been a lonely crusade.

"I do feel resistance to the message," Dr. Deal says. "It's a heck of a lot easier to say, 'To hire good millennial workers just offer them iPods and let them wear jeans.' "

Ms. Terlecki says the only time she thinks about the generation gap is when her older colleagues tease her about how easy their jobs are now, with the benefits of the Internet and BlackBerrys.

She doesn't mind. But she's already bristling at the entitled attitudes of a few of the new interns who complain about their low pay. When she was an intern, she tells them, they weren't paid at all and she had to work two jobs to make ends meet.

"Oh you guys," she tells them with a world-weary sigh, "you don't appreciate what you have now."

Which is true?

Myth

Millennials are not really engaged at work, and will probably job-hop a lot.

They demand instant feedback, even when applying for a job.

Their tech-savvy will crush older generations.

Reality

Millennials score the same on measures of career engagement as Gen-Xers and baby boomers.

They're willing to go through a long job application process.

They prefer online tools, but don't necessarily have more experience than Xers and boomers.

Source: Beyond the Cover Story: Research-Grounded Insights Into Millennial-Generation Employees