It’s become gospel in recent years that workers jump from job to job to
job. Some reports say that the average person entering the workforce
today will go through as many as 20 jobs in a career. It’s been cited as
a symptom of a new crop of workers who avoid committing to a single
employer more than a few years. Job hopping has become so mainstream
that staying with a single company for more than three or four years now
needs to be justified with evidence of accomplishments and career
advancement, much in the way job hopping has had to have justification
behind it.
It’s a trend that was true of male workers from the early 1980’s through
the late 1990’s. In that time frame, the current tenure of wage and
salaried male employees over 25 years old fell from 5.9 years to 4.9
years. Since 2002, however, the median male tenure actually grew from
4.9 to 5.5 years. Over that same period, the median tenure of women grew
from 4.4 years to 5.4 years—tenures of women had also grown in the
decade and a half when male tenures were falling, but that is largely
attributable to a change in the career mix of women which began to favor
longer tenure-professions.
“The 1980s and 90s was a period filled with tremendous opportunity, when
employees discovered the power of being free agents and the salary
advantages of changing jobs. Since the turn of the millennium though,
the economy has been markedly less stable, and employees have been less
likely to seek out unnecessary instability by changing positions,” says
Rob Romaine, president of MRINetwork.
While consistent tenures of less than three or four years can still
cause negative perceptions, being open to change careers in a slow
economy like today can be an effective way to jumpstart a career. During
the recession many employees took on added responsibilities without
receiving a promotion, and those who did see promotion, often saw them
in title only. The slow economy caused annual salary adjustments to stay
in the low single-digit percentages, yet job changers who succeeded at
adding value to their organizations throughout the recession can now
find salary increases of 10 or 20 percent or more with new employers.
“In sectors of the economy that have reached, or even far surpassed
their pre-recession levels, like technical consulting, accounting, or
healthcare, rising tenure can mean even fewer experienced candidates are
available for mid-career opportunities,” notes Romaine. “But, it also
means that opportunities for those willing to change positions will be
both more plentiful, and have more potential for reward.”
Median tenure for the healthcare industry over the last decade has
increased from 3.5 to 4.4 years, lengthening by three-tenths of a year
since just 2010. Professional and technical services median tenure has
grown even more—from 3.1 to 4.4 years since 2002.
For employers trying to find top performers, workers staying in their
positions longer means simply finding them becomes more difficult. The
longer someone isn’t actively in the job market, the older and more out
of date their discoverable footprints become. LinkedIn profiles go
unmaintained. Resumes in databases grow so old they are irrelevant.
“Finding top talent that isn’t trying to be found requires constant
surveillance and proactive network-building. There is nothing automated
about the process and it’s challenging for an internal recruiting
apparatus to proactively build a pipeline for key positions that a
company may only be hiring for every few years,” notes Romaine.
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