Millennials may not have been the real job-hoppers after all
New BLS data shows late boomers had actually held more jobs by the same age.
Before Gen Z’s blank stare took over the workplace discourse, millennials were the generation everyone had a theory about: entitled, purpose-seeking, allergic to office life, and, perhaps above all, job-hoppy — the idea that they were less willing to commit, bouncing from employer to employer in search of better pay, faster growth… or maybe just a fun office with sleep pods and balance balls.
But new analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells a different story. According to the agency’s longitudinal survey data, Americans born from 1980 to 1984 had held an average of 9.4 jobs from age 18 through 38, fewer than the 10.2 jobs held by those born from 1957 to 1964 over the same age span.
The two cohorts accumulated jobs at almost identical rates until their mid-20s, when the boomer group began to pull ahead, ending up with nearly one additional job by age 38.
So, was the millennial job-hopper myth overstated? A September report from the National Institute on Retirement Security suggests it was, finding that shorter tenure among younger workers is “largely consistent across generations.” The bigger driver of job-hopping, per the report, is the kind of labor market that makes it worthwhile, where companies are hiring and wages are rising.
That surely wasn’t the backdrop for early millennials, who came of age during the dot-com bust and were just getting started when the Great Recession hit, both of which likely made job-switching less attractive, or simply less available. Late boomers, by contrast, moved through their early careers in a far more mobile labor market: per the Institute of Labor Economics, job-to-job transitions ran higher through much of the 1980s and 1990s, before falling sharply after the 2001 recession and again after the 2008 financial crisis.
And, if this pattern sounds familiar, it might be because workers today are back in job-hugging mode, caught in a “low-fire, low-hire” economy where hiring has slowed, wage growth has cooled, and the quits rate remains near its lowest level in a decade.
