Justin Fox, Columnist

Sticking With the Same Job Isn't Out of Style

American men changes jobs more than they used to. But not that much more.

January 12, 2016 at 6:25 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Fewer than you think take the leap.
Photographer: Mohd Rasfan/afp/getty images

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It is widely believed that Americans change jobs a lot more than they used to. After years of digging through employment data in search of tectonic shifts, I have found that such widely held beliefs:

So when I came across a reference on Twitter this week to a 2003 newspaper column claiming that "average job tenure" in the U.S. had fallen from 22.5 years in 1960 to 3.6 in 1996, I figured that couldn't be right. There are always lots of young people who have just started jobs, so to get to an average tenure of 22.5 years, you would also need lots of people who had been with the same employer for 30 or 40 years -- which in 1960 meant they would have held that job right through the Great Depression and World War II.