Justin Fox, Columnist

Stuck in That Same Old Dead-End Job

Workers might finally be feeling a little more comfortable making their move.

May 3, 2017 at 7:00 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.”

Change is good. Right?
Photographer: Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg

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I was at a conference last week on the "Digital Future of Work." Expert after expert talked about the new reality of the workplace, in which doing the same thing for the same employer for years and years was no longer possible, and job switching and career switching are inevitable. Median job tenure, said a participant in one panel discussion -- and others were soon repeating the statistic -- was down to just 2.5 years.1493832996076

"Hmmm," I thought to myself when I heard that. "That doesn't sound quite right." I had a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection, so I checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest data on median job tenure for wage and salary workers in the U.S.: 4.2 years in 2016. That was down from 4.6 years in 2014 but still higher than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s: