Jobs

This Is the Job People Keep the Longest

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: April 23, 2021 8:20 am

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.

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.

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