Have my classmates quit their jobs yet?
Answer: Many have, but not the ones you’d think.
As pre-professional as we’d been back in college, we were surprisingly reluctant to commit to any profession. Most of us looking for jobs expected to go into either consulting or finance. We treated it like graduate school: We were only expecting to do one or two years before somehow magically discovering what we really wanted to do.
It’s become a pop culture joke. Forbes reports that 91% of millennials expect to stay in a job for less than three years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the average worker has been with their current employer for 4.6 years.
Great. We as a generation seem to be “footloose” and “anti-work”. But the arguments mostly come from op-eds, non-scientific surveys, and behavioral studies that compare generations without accounting for age differences. And people talk about millennials as if we’re one homogeneous hive mind. Do these trends really apply to people I know?
I decided to push the limits of the LinkedIn Terms & Conditions to find out.
I scraped 200 profiles from members of my graduating class who have had 2 or more years of work experience. Within that there were just over a hundred Class of 2013 graduates, which is an impressive ~5% of the entire class.
The industries of that sample are also surprisingly close to the official University of Pennsylvania Career Services survey. Geographically, exactly half of my group lives in New York, while San Francisco and Philadelphia come in next at 11% and 10% respectively.
So, let’s answer the original question. I took the Class of 2013 graduates who have had 2 -3 years of work experience after graduation and calculated how many have switched companies within that time frame.
Turns out, 59% of my class has changed employers since graduating.
Somewhat surprising — over half of my connections have switched jobs. Seems like we’re holding up the millennial archetype. But a single average doesn’t tell us that much. What happens when we look at it by industry?
Technology, as expected, has the highest turnover. Since they’re my connections, I know that many of these folks switched in from another career or are running a serial startup lifestyle.
Interestingly, the “Other” category is the next highest. From looking at the names, I know that they aren’t transplants. It’s a mixed bag from healthcare to the military, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions except that maybe we are a flighty bunch. For the people who have switched jobs, they stayed just over a year at their previous company. (This is lower than the overall average length of a job, since it doesn’t take into account people who are still in the same role since they graduated.)
Most surprisingly, finance and consulting have the lowest attrition rate. That’s not even considering that many of the people who are listed in the consulting category had previously switched from finance. Despite all the people saying they’d take the job to get a couple years of experience and salary, it doesn’t seem like many have switched gears yet. (I’d know, since I’m one of them.)
It makes more sense when you look at when people leave.
People tend to leave at the benchmarks: six months, one year, and two years. I suspect that part of the reason people stay so long is because finance and consulting companies set up definitive and comfortable milestones, like promotions with comfortably large raises after two years. If you can get people to stay past that point, attrition drops.
Now, as hopefully you noticed, this is the least rigorous analysis possible. The sample sizes are reasonable though small, but they are biased by who I’m connected with on LinkedIn. It’s also self-reported and isn’t sensitive to freelance or short term work someone may have taken before embarking on their main career. And obviously, an immediately employed group of Ivy League-educated pre-professionals is probably not representative of the millennial generation as a whole. But while I couldn’t publish this in any self-respecting journal, it’s a hell of a lot better than hearing tired anecdotes from the media.
To my graduating class: It’s reaching that two year mark. If you’re worried about wanting to leave your job (or wanting to stay), you should know that you’re not alone. The numbers I crunched represent some of the smartest and most ambitious people I know. Either way, you’ll be in good company.
