Millennials job-hop to flee lowly rewards for employee loyalty
Staying put with an employer comes at a cost as wages stagnate and benefits like pensions are cut across the economy
Amanda Healy has worked for three companies in the last three years.
She's had her present job as a marketing manager for TIBCO Software for about eight months. Her stint at her previous employer lasted only 10 months.
The 26-year-old says she isn't a habitual job-hopper. (She was with her first employer for 31/2 years.) But she thinks the moves she made between employers were vital to advancing her career - and increasing her pay, 25 per cent every time. Each move came with more responsibility.
"There was a gap in my skill set, and the next role really helped to fill that gap," Healy says.
Other American workers her age haven't been so lucky. For all the stereotypes that millennials are entitled, noncommittal job-hoppers, younger workers are staying in their jobs longer than previous generations did. In the late 1980s, about half of 20- to 25-year-olds changed jobs each year, but that dropped to 35 per cent after the recession, analysis by The Washington Post showed.
It's not clear if millennials are holding on to those jobs by choice or if they are struggling to find better opportunities. But it is clear that staying put has a cost, mostly because of the kinds of jobs millennials are likely to land these days: lower-paying positions that often don't require a college degree.
Median wages in the US have stagnated or fallen over the past decade in four of the five sectors hiring the most millennials today, according to a report last week. Pay cuts were particularly significant for people working in retail, where annual pay was US$2,000 less than what it would have been 10 years ago.