I was interested to read this piece about Gen Z being ready to quit their jobs very quickly:
“For a certain subset of younger workers, who entered the workforce as the Great Resignation picked up steam, quitting has become a way of life. That’s created a vacuum of institutional knowledge and a set of managers who are focused on searching for new talent or leaving, too. When faced with those conditions, Gen Z has adapted to a new normal: When in doubt, find a new job. Welcome to Generation Quit.”
The traditional advice used to be to try and stay with your first job for a couple of years, as that will look good on your resume long term. Has that changed for your kids? Or are the people cited in this article going to suffer long term from their job hopping? One part does suggest that moving on so quickly isn’t good for these young adults’ careers:
“What’s really important here is that young adults are not getting the socialization to workplace norms, and they’re also not getting mentoring,” Pamela Aronson, a professor of sociology and an affiliate of women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told Insider.
“There’s so many more disruptions, and there’s so much less of a sense that this is a place I want to be for a long time,” Aronson said.“
Public school retiree here. What I see in teaching is folks staying for 5-6 years and then moving on. Either really moving…having kids, or changing jobs. Or just leaving the profession altogether, and retraining for something else.
In my peer group…most of us worked at the same place for 25 years of more. That simply doesn’t happen very often anymore…from my observation.
D1 quite her first job last year. She went there as an intern and left as an MD after 10 years. She said she grew up at that bank.
D2 is a second year associate at a law firm and worked at her first legal internship for 2 years. She is working for the same person from her first internship.
I guess my kids are into long term relationships.
On the other hand, their mom has changed jobs every year (some even 6 months) in the last 10 years. I am the unstable one.
But also note that it is the norm (historically and currently) for newer entrants to the labor force to change jobs more frequently than those who have been in the labor force for a while. Also, with frequent layoffs being the norm, there is less notion of employee loyalty when employers are commonly seen to have none.
I’m thrilled that D, almost 25, has stayed in her first real job for a year and a half. She feels zero loyalty to the company and will jump ship without hesitation if something better comes along.
I am equally thrilled that my D, also almost 25, loves her first job and company and wants to stay with it forever. That seems possible where she works. She would not enjoy job-hopping.
Our S has been at his first full time job for about 2 years. I can’t see him moving anywhere yet - he truly loves what he does and enjoys all his coworkers.
That said, he receives recruiter queries from LinkedIn on almost a daily basis. He disregards most but connects with some for the future. He has some very specific and In-demand AI/ML skills.
My advise to him is that he is his own corporation so he needs to dispassionately handle his employment accordingly.
My almost 25 year old and 26 year old are still with the companies they interned with in college. A good friend of mine works closely with the owner of an accounting firm in town, he’s tried twice to recruit my daughter (CPA). She is somewhat loyal to her firm, it would take significant $ for her to switch (she likes the people she works with too).
My ODD is 26 and has been with her current company since she graduated. She loves it, has been promotes several times and there is a great career path if she decides that’s the way for her. My S aged 24 also has been with the same company since he graduated. The company is well known for having “lifer” employees. People I graduated with from HS still work there as executives. He’s very happy with it but of the 2 he’d be the more likely to move if the opportunity presents.
I have friends whose children change their jobs so fast that their parents sometimes lose track where they currently work. And some of those changes started long before the pandemic.
My S stayed in his first job for 9 years (was starting to look after 7 years but covid hit and he stayed on longer which worked out nicely as he got another promotion during that time).
My D stayed for about a year. Again it was influenced by covid as the special needs school she was working at put all employees on an indefinite unpaid hiatus (she felt they handled the covid crisis quite poorly overall) so she moved on. She worked online part-time during the height of covid and then moved to another state and found a full-time job close to home. She hopes to stay with this job long-term but we’ll see.
Our eldest daughter was recruited by a friend of a friend for a small family engineering company. I think she lasted three months. Then, she went to a big corporate firm and she was very well-liked and respected, and developed a training system while incorporating contractual obligations.
They scrapped her program and laid off her very young staff (10+), but asked her to stay on. She was loyal to her staff and called in some favors, set them up at other companies, before leaving. They offered more money, but she had already committed to another firm.
She’s felt no loyalty and continues to rise in position and pay. She averages 2 years.
For us I do not think that our kid’s experience is all that different from what my wife’s and my experience had been decades earlier. “Bachelor’s degree, two to five years of work, graduate school” seems to be our model.
After graduating university I had a very short term job for the summer while looking for a longer term position. Then I worked for two years at a research facility. Half way through I started applying to graduate programs with support from my management. My wife’s situation was similar, but with some time in the Peace Corps thrown in between three years of working all of which led to graduate school.
Both daughters had short term summer jobs after graduating. In both cases the job was only supposed to last for the summer. My older daughter then got a longer term job at a veterinary clinic. After a bit more than a year she started applying to DVM programs with the strong support of the veterinarian who was her boss. She completed a bit more than two years at the veterinary clinic and then went to graduate school. My younger daughter had her short term summer job in Canada (where she had graduated from university), and while there looked for a permanent job and found nothing. She then traveled for three months then returned home for Christmas, got several job offers and started working at one of them. She has been just barely over a year at her current job and is intending to stay for a bit while thinking about graduate school. She has seen coworkers leave, partly over the perceived instability of funding and also due to some layoffs.
One daughter did have what I think was the strangest job interview that I have ever heard of. The entire interview occurred on the side of the road after midnight during a veterinary emergency. My daughter stopped as a good samaritan, helped a veterinarian clean up and bandage an injured horse, and then was offered a job while they were still standing on the side of the road in the dark.
D stayed in her first post-college position (after 10 months as a barista) for 3.5 years. She left to work at a start up that offered opportunities to expand her knowledge in her field. The company folded after the initial project, so D returned to the first job after a little over a year & a half away … and the knowledge she gained translated into being rehired at an elevated level & salary. She worked there another five years & was lured away to a new company by some former coworkers. She’s currently very happy after a year with this company.
S stayed in his first job post-college for 9 months, left to substitute teach for 9 months (thought maybe he wanted to get a teaching certificate but decided it wasn’t for him), and then got a job in a chem lab. All of these jobs were low paying, and none of them offered much in the way of career potential. He left the chem lab after a year to work as an analytical chemist in a different industry. The company took advantage of him to a shameful degree, but he felt that he needed to stick it out two years to be a good candidate for a new job. He then got a good job with a good lab, doing work he enjoyed … but after two years, he was wondering what he would do long term. There was really no career progression available. Out of the blue, around the two year mark at his job, a mid sized international company approached him about a position. He got the job and is excited about the long term opportunities with this company.
I know a young couple who have had so many job changes that I can’t keep track of them. They are constantly getting new jobs. I don’t know whether they are leaving for more money, more professional development, a dislike of the company, or some other reason. But to be honest, most of the young people I know tend to move jobs because they don’t see a forward progression where they are. Unlike H’s experience with the company where he worked for 42 years, they don’t foresee being moved up in their current company … they feel that they have to leave in order to move up and/or be properly compensated.
My D is 26 and is still at the same place she started at after college, but there’s a licensure process in her field that takes that long. She’s completed it and I wouldn’t be that surprised if she made a change at some point, although she really likes her company. If she left it would be to change locations more than firms.
Second kid took a two year position that is considered grad school prep. She completed the two years and is now in grad school. She would consider going back to that firm after grad school, as she liked the field a lot.
Older son moved jobs about every 3-6 months while working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife. After 2 1/2 years he joined a private environmental consulting firm and worked there 2 years before moving to another consulting firm in a new location of California where he has been for the last 1 1/2years.
Younger son worked at his first post graduate job for 2 1/2 years but not in his specific interest of Cybersecurity. He then found a job with a Cybersecurity company (completely remote) and has been there for the 3 years. The company was recently acquired by Google but his job still remains with the Cybersecurity company.
Well…rule of thumb usually is that you don’t quit a job unless you have another to go to.
People in my boomer generation often switched jobs because THAT was the way to get a better job and higher salary, and sometimes better working conditions. DH switched engineering jobs multiple times for just this reason. Better compensation, better job opportunities, better companies, diverse work experiences. And I mean significant salary and benefit increases.