A job for life? Have things really changed so much?

There is a lot of talk about the changing world of work, jobs for life and the fact that they don't exist any more. Everyone has a story about their Uncle Max / Father / Jim from down the road, who left school, joined the Gas Board / Post Office / Merchant Navy and left there with a gold watch on their 60th birthday, and comments that "you'd never get that now..." . There is in the press and in the world at large, an assumption that things aren't as they used to be, and as career coaches, we need to know what is going on and respond to it in our advice to policy makers, our theories and in our work with our clients.

So what exactly is thie new world of work? The new concept involves a number of key assumptions. First and foremost is the idea of a dramatic shift around job security (e.g. Arthur's Boundaryless Career). The accepted rhetoric is that a generation ago people assumed that they could stay with their first employer until they retired, but that the picture these days is much less certain, with job insecurity and periods of unemployment much more common. Individuals are thought to be likely to have more jobs in their working lives than was expected in the 1970s. Following on from this is the idea that individuals now need to take responsibility for their own career development and their continued employability, where a generation ago this was thought to be the role of the employer.

But does* the data back this up?

I've long been a bit sceptical about how much of a change there has actually been. My personal experience doesn't really give support to the idea of a dramatic shift - I know plenty of people in my parents' generation who had a whole range of jobs, and plenty of people in mine who have been pretty stable.

So I've done so rooting around and found some interesting bits of evidence. It’s not always easy to piece things together (e.g. there seems to have been quite a change in the way that data was collected in about 1992, making it a bit difficult to compare pre-’92 with post-’92), but here are a few statistics:

·         From 1975 – 1992 men’s average job tenure (i.e. average length of time in a single job) changed from 10.2 years to 9.9 years.

·         Women’s stayed static at 6.6 years during the same period.

·         From 1992 to 2006 average job tenure (men and women combined) increased from 8.1 to 8.8  years.

Now these stats may disguise some localized changes – it may be that particular career areas have changed more dramatically in one direction or another, but the broad picture is pretty clear. The concept of a job for life is no less accurate now than it was a generation ago. Careers are no less stable overall than they were 40 years ago. A job for life should not have been taken for granted in the 1970s and should not be ruled out today.

I need to get some more information on all this. I’d like to try and get some more directly comparable data that goes right through from the seventies to the present day. It would be good to see if we could compare different industry areas. And given that older workers tend to stay longer in jobs, what impact does the ageing work force have on these stats? And what about motivation? Are there any differences in people’s reasons for changing jobs over the decades? I’d also really like to know more about career changes as well as job changes. Identifying when a job changes becomes a career change is hard and this makes the data more tricky to find, but I bet it’s out there somewhere. Do let me know if you’ve come across anything in this arena.

So finally, what does this all mean to us? Maybe nothing. The developments in career theories that have assumed this idea of increased job insecurity focus on ideas that encourage control and self-efficacy, and you can’t argue with that. But really, don't we want career theories that work because they build on an accurate picture, rather than those that we find we can use despite their misunderstanding of the current picture? And are there any problems with us perpetuating a myth? Isn’t it our role to bring an objective and evidence-based voice to the debate? I'd love your views. 


* I know it should be "do" the data, but it just doesn't sound right...

Arthur, M. B. (1994) "The boundaryless career: a new perspective for organizational inquiry" Journal of Organizational Behavior 11 295 - 306

Burgess, S. and Rees, H. (1996) “Job Tenure in Britian 1975 – 1992” The Economic Journal 106 334 - 344
Rodrigues, R.A. and Guest, D. (2010) "Have careers become boundaryless?" Human Relations 63 (8) 1157 - 1175