This Is the Job People Keep the Longest

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 23, 8:20AM EDT

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This Is the Job People Keep the Longest — © lovro77 / Getty Images

Right or wrong, there is an impression that younger generations of workers are more likely to move from company to company and even career to career. After the COVID-19 pandemic kept people, for the most part, in the jobs they had pre-pandemic, recently 26% of people have considered leaving their current positions, according to Prudential Financial.
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A review of the jobs landscape shows that the amount of time people stay in certain industries varies widely. In fact, in some major job sectors, people stay less than three years on average. In at least one, the tenure is closer to a decade.

Skynova looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data from 2010 to 2020 to see in which major job categories people stayed the longest and shortest. Public sector jobs were excluded, although the research did reveal federal employees stayed in the sector for eight years.
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The sector where people kept their jobs the longest was utilities. The figure was 7.7 years. It was followed by telecommunications at 6.6 years. No other sector topped six years. The research pointed out:

In 2020, the average hourly wage for utilities jobs was over $43, and the unemployment rate fell dramatically by September 2020, despite the potential impact from the pandemic recession.

That equates to nearly $90,000 a year, well above the national average for individual income.

The BLS data on utility jobs shows that the sector employed 540,000 people nationwide as of March. The unemployment level among them was an extremely low 4.4%. That may point to job security. Twenty-two percent of those working in the sector are represented by unions. Among utility workers by category, electrical engineers are paid the highest at just over $105,000 a year.

At the far end of the spectrum in terms of job tenure by sector were accommodation and food workers. No one who has studied the job losses in the sector due to the pandemic will find this a surprise.

Click here to see which are the best jobs in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.