Jaisa Martins has had six different jobs since graduating from Union County College in 2014.
She works in the office administrative field, and during the past decade her salary has doubled to $65,000.
Martins’ experience is not unique.
New data from payroll and human resources firm ADP showed that the income hike for job-stayers was 5% year-over-year, compared with a 9.3% increase inincome during the same period for those who switched jobs.
The point?
Company loyalty may not pay what it used to.
“When I talk to parents when they come in to orientation or admitted students day, one of the things I tell them is that your children will have 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetime,” said LaQuan Norman, director of the career development center at Ramapo College in Mahwah.
And company loyalty, for what it’s worth, is now a two-way street between the worker and the business, Norman said.
“I think [company loyalty is] great, especially if the employer shows you that loyalty and commitment when times get tough,” she said.
In the past, some employees would stay with the same company for decades, gradually increasing their income and level of seniority. Eventually they retired from that one company and lived out their golden years.
But experts say those days are long gone. And even in the best of times, not everyone was able to attain that lifestyle.
“That’s a golden time that’s probably a half-mythical, golden haze of nostalgia. It wasn’t true for most of the labor force, even in the post-World War II period,” said Scott Seibert, a human resources professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Job hopping has slowed since the Great Resignation
Granted, job hopping is slower than it was during the Great Resignation — a period of time shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic when power was vested with the employee.
The level of job changing dropped below pre-COVID levels in 2023, after surging during the prior two years, Bank of America data shows.
Meanwhile, wages for new hires in February was 1.8% above the same month in 2023, compared with a more than 5% increase in 2022, payroll provider Gusto said.
Nonetheless, experts say job hopping is here to stay.
In 2022, the median tenure at a job was nearly 10 years for those ages 55 and older, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median number of years decreased with younger generations; tenure was just over one year for the 20-to-24 age group. It’s a trend that has continued since at least 2012, the bureau reported.
“There’s different kinds of generational ideologies around work, and where I think it was possible to be in a company for 30 years and progress and evolve and continue to get promoted and kind of have a retirement fund waiting for you when you left — I don’t think that’s really realistic anymore,” said Rebecca Henninger, a career coach and resume writer in Montville.
The average length of time spent at a job was eight years and three months for baby boomers, five years and two months for Gen X, two years and nine months for millennials, and two years and three months for Gen Z, CareerBuilder said.
What changed?
The career landscape saw its largest shifts in the 1980s and 1990s with increased international competition and “waves of corporate downsizing,” Princeton University’s Henry Farber wrote in a 2008 paper.
Private sector unionization began to decline, Matthew Bidwell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said in a 2013 paper. Indeed, union membership in the private sector fell from 20% in 1983 to 10% in 2023, the Pew Research Center said.
“As firms faced less threat of collective action from employees, they may have been less likely to prefer established workers in the allocation of jobs, pay raises and benefits, making it less attractive for workers to stay within the organization,” Bidwell wrote.
“The reduced power of unions may also have made firms more willing to lay workers off," he wrote. "Where those layoffs fell on longer-serviced workers or were followed by replacement hiring, such layoffs would also contribute to reduced tenure.”
Employers also faced increased international competition and technological advances, both of which whittled away at employee tenure, Bidwell wrote.
Businesses saw less of an advantage to keep employees on the payroll for the long term because of globalization and outsourcing, he wrote. Technological advances such as the computer “became cheaper and more capable,” and “in some cases, technology replaced labor in production processes.”
But even before the 1980s, not everyone had access to long-term career stability at a single employer, said Seibert, of Rutgers.
Just a portion of white men had those opportunities, Seibert said, while women and minorities found themselves switching between jobs, albeit maybe every five years as opposed to every two years in the present day.
“What’s changed is now even white males don’t have that,” he said.
What do employers think about hiring job hoppers?
“In the long-term, too many job changes, especially with multiple organizations versus within the same organization, can potentially harm a job seeker on their search,” said Colleen Georges, a career and life coach based in Piscataway.
Sabrina Sanichar, who heads career services at Montclair State University’s Feliciano School of Business, said employees who commit to a company for the longer term “have an opportunity to cultivate a strong reputation with their employer with increasing job responsibilities and build a positive rapport with industry professionals in their field.”
And they have the ability to attain higher wages through promotions and raises, she said.
How to switch jobs wisely
“In your early career, you take part-time work, doing things to fill in when you’re in school. Then you might try your first job, you might go back to school, so the change rate is quite a bit higher in early career than mid- or later career, where maybe two years applies,” Seibert said.
“Then you want to craft a story about why you’re moving, that it makes sense, that helps you reach those goals,” he continued. “You’re creating your own career path that might now cross multiple firms. If you’re clearly doing that, you can develop a coherent logic about why you’re making those moves, and that would deal with concerns a company would have.”
One drawback to job hopping, said job-searching site FlexJobs, is that the employee has to start over with benefits, such as vacation time accrual and 401(k) access.
But at least for Martins, who now lives in Union County, the practice of switching jobs has been a boom.
“I strongly believe that me switching jobs was an important factor … why my salary doubled,” she said. “If I had stayed at my previous positions, my salary growth would not have been significant.”
Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record.
Email:munozd@northjersey.com; Twitter:@danielmunoz100
