There was a time when a job was for life. A bit of an alien concept nowadays since, according to researchers, the number of times the average person changes careers is on the rise.
So, how many jobs will you now have over your lifetime?
The professional networking site LinkedIn has been number crunching to find out the answer to just this question, and from the data of 500 million users looking back over 20 years they’ve found that millennials (those born in years between the early 1980s and the early 2000s) will change jobs an average of four times in their first decade out of education, compared to an average of two job changes by Gen Xers (those born from the early 1960s up to the early 1980s) during their first ten years out of education.
These numbers do show that we change jobs more often than older generations, but they don’t say how many jobs in total we may have. For this the best data comes from an American study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thanks to a longterm study they found that, on average, people in the study held 11.7 jobs between the ages of 18 and 48. Around 27% were very prone to job changes, having had 15 jobs or more, and 10% had had between 0 and 4 jobs.
It might not sound like a huge number of job changes (or maybe it does if you’ve been in the same job for the past X number of years), but it’s still a good idea given this job-change data to keep your skills updated, build on your knowledge, and keep an eye out for opportunities. Thanks to the growing pace of technology (among other things) even those who stay in the same job are finding that the world of work is changing incredibly quickly. Being up to date on your skills and keeping pace with changes will help to give you a bit more security and make you a strong candidate in the future should you choose to or have to change career.
