Tenure Up As Employees Stick With Their Jobs Longer

Filed under: Keeping Your Job,Labor,News,The Economy |

Median job tenure is up as employees stick with their current employers longer, while the unemployment rate remains high and quality jobs scarce.

In January 2012, the median number of years that workers had been with their current employer was 4.6 years, according to new numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is up from 4.4 years in January 2010.

Median employee tenure is the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure.

Manufacturing workers have the longest job tenure of any industry at 6 years with the same employer.

Manufacturing workers have the longest job tenure of any industry at 6 years with the same employer.

Median employee tenure varies by age.

Older workers tend to have more years with the same employer than their younger counterparts.

Median tenure for employees age 65 and over was 10.3 years in January 2012. This is more than three times the tenure for workers age 25 to 34 at 3.2 years.

Public Sector Employee Tenure

Public sector workers had almost double the time in the same job as private sector employees, 7.8 years versus 4.2 years.

The longer tenure among workers in the public sector is explained, in part, by the age profile of government  Median years of tenure with current employer for employed wage and salary workers, aged 16 years and over, by industry, January 2012workers. About three quarters of government workers are age 35 and over, compared with about three in five workers in private business.

Manufacturing workers have the highest median tenure among the major industries at six years.

Turnover was highest in leisure and hospitality, which has the lowest median tenure at 2.4 years.

Twenty-one percent of all wage and salary workers age 16 and over had a year or less of tenure with their current employer in January 2012.

This short-tenured group of workers includes new entrants and reentrants to the labor force, job losers who found new jobs during the previous year and workers who had voluntarily changed employers.

In January 2012, median employee tenure for men was 4.7 years, little changed from January 2010. Women have been staying on the job longer. Median tenure for women in January 2012 was 4.6 years, up from 4.2 years in January 2010.

These statistics come from the BLS Current Population Survey (CPS) program. Information on employee tenure is gathered from supplemental questions added to the CPS every two years since 1996.

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