Find Generation Based on Birth Year

Ever wondered if someone is a Millennial, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha just based on their year of birth? In this post, we’ll show you how to build a fun little Apex method that takes a person’s birth year and tells you which generation they belong to.

This is a simple and beginner-friendly use case that’s perfect for learning how to work with conditional statements, return types, and basic logic in Apex.

🧠 What Are We Trying to Do?

We want to create a method that:

• Accepts a year of birth (as an Integer)

• Checks where that year falls in known generation ranges

• Returns the generation label as a string (e.g., “Gen Z”)

Here’s a quick reference:

• Millennials: 1980–1994

• Gen Z: 1995–2009

• Gen Alpha: 2010–2024

This can be a great utility in CRM systems where you might want to segment users or customers by generation for personalization or targeting.

🔍 Code Explanation

public class ApexUseCaseNine {
    
    public static String checkGenerationType(Integer yearOfBirth){

We start by defining a class called ApexUseCaseNine with a static method named checkGenerationType. It takes a single input: yearOfBirth, which is an integer representing the person’s birth year.

        String genType = '';

We initialize a string variable to hold the generation label we’ll return.

        if(yearOfBirth >= 1980 && yearOfBirth <= 1994){
            genType = 'Millenial';
        }

We first check if the year is between 1980 and 1994 (inclusive). If so, we assign the value “Millenial” to genType.

        else if(yearOfBirth >= 1995 && yearofBirth <= 2009){
            genType = 'Gen Z';
        }

Next, we check for the Gen Z range.
⚠️ Note: There’s a typo here — yearofBirth should be yearOfBirth. (We’ll fix this below.)

        else if(yearOfBirth >= 2010 && yearOfBirth <= 2024){
            genType = 'Gen Alpha';
        }

Then we check if the year falls within the Gen Alpha range.

        return genType;
    }
}

Finally, we return the result string — which will contain the generation name or remain empty if the year doesn’t match any defined range.

✅ Why This Is Useful

This method is fun but also practical. You can use this logic to:

• Personalize messages based on generation

• Segment customer data for marketing

• Add fun features to your Salesforce app like “Find Your Generation!”

It also teaches you how to use conditional if-else logic and return custom text values — which is a very common pattern in Apex programming.

🧾 Final Code Snippet (Fixed)

public class ApexUseCaseNine {
    
    public static String checkGenerationType(Integer yearOfBirth){
        String genType = '';
        if(yearOfBirth >= 1980 && yearOfBirth <= 1994){
            genType = 'Millenial';
        }
        else if(yearOfBirth >= 1995 && yearOfBirth <= 2009){
            genType = 'Gen Z';
        }
        else if(yearOfBirth >= 2010 && yearOfBirth <= 2024){
            genType = 'Gen Alpha';
        }
        return genType;
    }
}

🎥 Watch It in Action!

Want to see this in action? Watch my quick demo showing how this method runs in the Developer Console and how you can tweak it.