“… Sixty percent of millennials, ages 22-32, have changed jobs between one and four times in the last five years, according to State Street Global Advisors.” …
Why is this a surprising statistic? Those up through about age 28 have overwhelmingly graduated college in the last 5 years so of course they’ve almost certainly changed jobs in the last 5 years.
If anything, that number seems low.
Wonder what that number is for non-millenials.
This really seems like a non-story and certainly doesn’t tell us why millenials “want to quit their jobs.”
One to four times in 5 years WAS not common when the goal does not seem to be making more money - at least for non-millennials like me.
It’s just a different world for them. They’ve watched their parents get laid off and messed around. So they don’t have that inbred foolish concept of loyalty. Bc we have come to find the corporate world has little loyalty for workers…so why should they?
Hasn’t it been the typical pattern in past generations for newer entrants to labor force to change jobs more frequently at the beginning? If so, this may not be that big of a story.
Of course, those who entered the labor force during economic or industry downturns may have had to change jobs because their employer downsized or went out of business.
Really? It wasn’t common to switch from the job you were working while in college to your post-graduation job?
If I had been included in this survey, it would be at least 5 different jobs in the last 5 years (I just turned 25). I had 2 early in college, switched to 2 different ones as an upperclassmen, and now a different one in grad school. If I had decided to simply finish with my masters rather than continuing on with a PhD program, it would be yet another job switch.
My trajectory as a young person is not unique which is why I don’t think this is particularly relevant. Personally, I think we should be happy that people aren’t working the same job they did in their late teens and early 20s as those were almost certainly low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Also another round of “likes” for HRS’s post!
I have had exactly 2 jobs as an adult - the first for 16 years and the second for 14 years. That’s a not-unusual pattern for people my age. Young people have an entirely different pattern.
I’m a baby boomer. Within five years of college graduation, I had lived in three cities (not including the city where my college was located), went through grad school and hadthree jobs. The following year, I interviewed and moved to another job in another state. On the other hand, my sister worked for exactly two organizations as an adult. My take? We have choices. Thank goodness.
I agree with comments above saying this is a non-story, ESPECIALLY when the reference is to changing ONE to FOUR times. That’s been normal for, like, forever. Now I am an unusual exception. Leaving aside short-term and part-time jobs, I have held exactly TWO jobs for my entire multi-decade career after I earned my PhD. They were both in the same line of work (college professor), but two different employers.
I could do this in part because success moving up the academic career ladder often brings promotions and salary raises, sometimes administrative appointments, but without needing to change employers.
But someone who earns a PhD now with the goal of becoming a college professor has a tougher time finding stable, tenure-stream appointments. They may go through a series of temporary or adjunct appointments, and may never be fortunate enough to get into a more stable position.
I don’t think there are nearly as many simple “hierarchical” career ladders to climb as there used to be. But in any case, there may not be nearly as many as people think there ought to be. Furthermore, there’s something of an entrepreneurial instinct among many: I’ll create my own processes, programs, doo-dads, etc. I’ll be a writer. I’ll become a consultant. I’ll create a start-up. I’ll be my own boss.
But let’s also be clear: the crash of 2007-8 was a disaster for many who were entering the job market after college in the early 2000’s. Some dropped out of the market and went (back) to college for an advanced degree. My daughter did that, and changed her career direction in the process. BFA (2003) —> MBA (2011) is not a common higher educational sequence! She had at least 3 employers before entering business school and had a couple more since then. That’s the way things are. There’s nothing wrong with the millenials themselves.
OTOH, her brother stopped with a BA (in 2000), never had a problem finding a job, and has had a productive and high-earning career. But he’s had 4 employers and performed 3 very different types of work. I don’t think this is unusual for his cohort. Young folks island hop until they find a place that they can settle for a longer period of time. They spend time figuring out how to make their mark in a rapidly changing economy.
The age group says 22-32 for the survey, typically people who are holding down full time jobs after college assuming they went to college.
The interesting change seems to be satisfaction more than upward mobility as the need for job change.
I think job-changing has escalated. I heard an HR recruitment speech a few years back that basically said a company should expect to hold onto an employee only 3-5 years. My retired sib had exactly 2 jobs after her college graduation. I think the lack of benefit for length of stay, disappearance of pensions, lack of career path within companies and the ubiquitous “reduction in force” have led younger generations to watch out for themselves rather than adopt the attitude of a paternalistic corporation.
Like @Pizzagirl , I worked in one school for 7 years, then I’ve been in my current school for the past 24. That’s it: 2 jobs in 31 years.
But I think this generation does things differently for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the internet provides them with information about opportunities that my generation simply didn’t have access to. (It’s a lot like the college search. My son has applied to schools his guidance counselor had never heard of.)
With the changes in the economy over the past decade or two, workplace attitudes have changed. Employee loyalty is sometimes less valued than it used to be; there’s the expectation from a lot of people that if a job no longer fits completely, they should be writing a resume. Too many employees know that they would be let go at the drop of a hat, so they’re less likely to stick with a company when it’s facing rough times.
I’m still very happy in school #2,and expect to one day retire from it. But I’m guessing that my children will face a different workplace environment.
We are also assuming they wanted to change jobs. The economy hasn’t exactly been robust over the time period discussed. Perhaps a number of these changes have been forced due to firings, layoffs, or underemployment.
There are tons of high paying jobs, they go unfilled because there are not enough people with the skills to do them. There are no longer high paid jobs for those with moderate skills, those days are gone forever. Technology will continue to replace menial work and even skilled work. And unfortunately, many college graduates fall in the moderate skill category, as there are way too many college graduates, many with average to below average cognitive ability. High paying jobs are precisely high paying because they are hard to do, and most can’t do the job! The only exception are government jobs which get to pay above market rates since the government can rob productive people to pay non productive people.
I’m a boomer. I changed jobs seven times before I was 32. So what?
Agree that this is not news. Long gone are the days of longterm employment at one company. No more pensions. No more incentive to stay. Companies do layoffs and hire contractors. Several decades ago I did consulting for what was then BellSouth. One of their staff, in the disability department where you’d think staff would be caring and concerned, said “don’t call us Ma Bell. We are not your mother”. Also, they did surveys of employees rating their colleagues before a layoff. It was called something like OJQ, for “Objective Job Quality”. The employees called it “oh just quit”. Rate your colleagues so they decide who to lay off? Yuk. And read the current threads about people having to train their off-shore replacements on how to do their job-- train the people that are taking away your gob and forcing your layoff? And we are surprised that there are frequent job changes? No surprise here.
I took a futuristics course back in the early 1990’s. At that time, they said that most people would,change CAREERS, not just jobs, but careers at least seven times in their lives. And many would be switch to careers that didn’t exist when they graduated from college.
I consider myself being extremely lucky that, in the past 24 years, I have changed job exactly once. But I changed jobs well too many times when I was “young”.
.
This reminds me of an event. A day or two before an employee was let go, the manager asked another colleague to prepare a list of test items and asked that soon-to-be-lay-off employee to take this written test. Only that person, but nobody else, in the group was asked to take that test. Two days later, that person was let go. It was also funny that the person who was let go was assigned to train many other employees in the same group before. We are talking about an employee who had been with that group for more than 4 years and in such a small company, everybody knows to what level an employee could or could not perform within half a year.
We do no know how “hard” the test is. But one colleague (who was one of the very capable and quite senior members in that company) said that if anyone wants to come up with a test and make him fail the test, it is definitely possible.
Another (quite senior) member said about this event from another point view: Well…,they really had not instructed him ever on how and what to do for a certain task, so of course he did not know how to do that kind of thing. (e.g., intentionally asked a Windows PC expert to solve a technical problem on a Linux computer, without even giving him an opportunity to look up the manual.)
Another person kind of guessed why the company (if the order to give out a written test so was from the HR department) chose to do this was to prevent that person from suing the company. (i.e., to establish the evidence that the person is incompetent on his job.)
Less than half a year later, the supposedly more capable person who had been asked to give out the test was also let go. He was not immune by helping getting rid of a colleague. In the past, we observed that when a person was assigned to do the dirty job of “axing other employees”, he was at least safe for a longer time (e.g., a year or two at least.)
Gen X here – this was normal for my college class ('99) and many of my '02 law class. I have exactly one friend who’s still in his first job after college graduation, and he feels like a freak – even though he was fortunate to find his ultimate dream job at the start.
What you describe doesn’t sound legal, mcat. It sounds discriminatory. There are other ways to handle an underperforming employee. And some states are a fire at will state, so little is needed, and small companies may have different regulations than larger ones with over 50 employees.