The most notable feature of the new labour market, as just about everyone agrees, is that people don’t stay tied to companies anymore. Instead of moving up through the ranks of one organization, they move laterally from company to company in search of what they want.
The playing field is horizontal and people are always on the roll. This kind of mobility is commonly seen in Silicon Valley. Since then, such hypermobility has become the norm across the entire economy.
Americans now change jobs on average every 3.5 years; and workers in their twenties switch jobs on average every 1.1 years, according to 2001 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
More than half of IT workers in the Information Week Salary Survey say they have been with their present employer for less than four years and expect to change jobs in less than three years. A quarter of these workers have been in their current job for two years or less and expect to change jobs in a year. More than 40 percent considered themselves “on the market” in 2001. And more than 60 percent say recruiters had contacted them in the past six months – on average, six times.
Fully 60 percent of respondents to a 2001 Towers Perrin survey said there is no longer any appropriate time an employee should stay with a company, and just 10 cited three to five years as appropriate. More than half were actively in the job market at the time of the survey, and more than two-thirds said they thought it would be easy to et another job, even in late 2001, when layoffs hit a ten-year high.
Source: Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, New York.
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