The average person holds 12 jobs during the span of a career, but how big a career jump are most of these moves? A recent article by FlowingData tries to find out by looking at occupations in the Current Population Survey—an ongoing U.S. government survey of people’s jobs—and comparing that with what people were doing the previous year.
The job with the highest switching rate (almost 55 percent) was lifeguard. That makes sense: lifeguard positions are usually held by a younger, temporary workforce that shifts with the seasons. On the other end of the spectrum were people like lawyers and judges, whose jobs require large investments of time and money to attain. Less than 5 percent of workers holding such positions left.
When people change jobs, they tend to get a new one in the same field of work. The fields bucking this trend are fishing, farming, and technician jobs, where 65 percent or more of the workers changed fields when they made a job switch. On the flip side, only about 20 percent of health-care practitioners and 30 percent of those working in engineering changed fields when switching jobs. However, those numbers might go up soon. According to a report by LinkedIn, millennials are 16 percent more likely to switch industries for a new job than non-millennials.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
