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In college, a career advisor told me that no matter how bad a job is, I really shouldn’t leave too soon. “In the business world, you can leave a job after less than one year—once,” he said firmly. “So pick your ‘once’ wisely.”
As with a lot of pre-pandemic professional advice, that tidbit is proving equal parts dated and demonstrably off-base.
Job hopping’s once poor connotations have made way for a new label: ‘quick quitting,’ which LinkedIn defines as leaving a job in under a year. New research from the networking platform finds that it’s most common among early-career workers, who are paid less, have less at stake, and are generally still figuring out what they want. It’s made managers and leaders frustrated as they try to figure out how to make Gen Z happy at work.
But now, LinkedIn finds, those in the corner office are getting in on the action. In mid-2021, “short-tenure moments” sprung up at around the same rate among workers of all levels. Soon thereafter, quick quit rates among entry-level workers began to stabilize, while managers’ rate of change hit 20% and VP execs’ reached 16% in February 2022, before settling to about 11% each in August.
It shows that seniority has little to do anymore with job loyalty—and may have much more to do with stress and dissatisfaction. Why? LinkedIn points at the ragged state of the hiring process and the ongoing headache of COVID disruptions.
“In absolute numbers, the youngest workers (i.e. Gen Zers in their early 20s) are most likely to be leaving quickly,” LinkedIn senior editor George Anders wrote. “But it’s the once-dependable middle generations (millennials and Gen X) that are showing the greatest increases in quick quitting.”
What’s so bad about job hopping?
In such an active market, workers have realized there’s no need to stick out a job for 12 or 18 months if it’s not meeting their needs or expectations, Dave Carhart, VP of people at employee management software firm Lattice, told Fortune in May.
In a Lattice survey from April, just over half of respondents who had been at their job for three months or less said they’re actively trying to leave. Fifty-nine percent of those between three and six months into a job said the same.
Of the 2,000 U.S.-based respondents, nearly three-quarters said they would be open to leaving their current role—regardless of how long they’ve been there—in the next six to 12 months. Only 47% of respondents said the same last year.
As for what actually pushes them to the door, MIT Sloan research finds that toxic work culture is the number one predictor of attrition—more than ten times as likely as low compensation. That explains the ballooning quiet quit rates among middle managers, for whom evolving hybrid workplace rules and management expectations have meant record-high levels of burnout.
Lucky for them, job hopping has never been less of a red flag.
“Historically, people have needed to worry about looking like a job hopper when they had a pattern of leaving jobs quickly,” Alison Green, hiring and management expert behind the Ask a Manager blog, told Fortune earlier this year.
“There’s a lot more understanding that you might have left because your employer was mishandling the pandemic or because they’re stuck in outdated practices around remote work,” Green said. “There’s so much churn going on right now—and so much power on the workers’ side that hasn’t been there traditionally—that [prospective] employers are much more willing to overlook short stays than they might have been previously.”
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