Millennials May Have Finally Started Job-Hopping
For Americans in their late 20s, 2021 was the biggest year for switching employers in two decades. Was it a fluke or a cliché finally turned real?
Switching jobs appears to be less a generational character trait and more the product of the labor market.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Remember the job-hopping millennial? “Millennials are a flight risk, making it absolutely vital for organizations to understand how to engage and retain these employees,” polling organization Gallup warned in a 2016 report that did much to establish the belief that employees born from 1981 to 1996 were uniquely averse to sticking around.
Like a lot of other things said about millennials in those days, this was mostly nonsense. Yes, Gallup’s polling found in 2016 that 21% of millennials had changed jobs in the previous year, more than three times the rate of older workers. But younger workers have always changed jobs much more frequently than older ones. The Census Bureau has been asking Americans about switching jobs for almost half a century now, and millennials actually stand out for how little of it they have done relative to previous generations. Still, something did happen in 2021.