Holding on to Job You Have

It's the Bad Old Pre-WWII Days

The future of work could be mutating into staying put in your current job. CNBC documents that. In a very uncertain era not job-hopping has emerged as the new kind of “employment security.” The pop culture lingo for it is “The Great Stay.“

This job trend seems to have staying power. At least for now.

After all, employers are reluctant to hire. If you’re not already in, it is nearly impossible to get in. Just ask any recent college graduate or read the postings on professional anonymous networks such as Reddit, Fishbowl and Glassdoor. On PR and Communications – Fishbowl there is this:

“From what I have heard, the job market has been tough everywhere. I wanted to quit and find a better job but all of this news about people spending months looking for a job or sending 100s of applications have given me pause.”

This shift reverses the more than half-century trend of job-hopping. And job-hopping reversed the embedded American working class ethos of getting a job, just about any job and holding on to it. Old-line urban political machines such as the Frank Hague one in Jersey City, New Jersey, operated on being able to hand out jobs.

Then after World War II there was the boom. So much opportunity. You were a loser if you didn’t chase after it and grab as much of it as possible.

Somehow it was discovered that if you dumped one employer and went to the next and the next and next the odds were you’d keep getting a bigger piece of the action. The new job didn’t pan out? Walk across the street and immediately you’d have a better one. Obviously, shaken off was the risk-aversion of The Great Depression generation as well as the ones before that.

Along with that, the GI bill kicked off access to higher education by the children of the working class. The new Knowledge Workers could also change entire industries. The middle manager at IBM could transfer that tech expertise to a higher-paying title in the auto sector.

In addition, the sheer number of the Boomer generation – 76 million – had created fierce competition. Frequent job changes or transitions into different industries had been standard tools for getting where you wanted to be.

That was then.

Currently, even the movers and shakers are opting to remain with the same organization. Rare is the Renaissance player like Larry Summers who had worked in a US cabinet position, World Bank, Harvard and more. It takes nosebleed compensation to shake brandname lawyers from their firm to another.

After retiring from Disney on a high note, Bob Iger had his pick of a Next. He chose to get his former CEO job back. His contract has been extended to 2026.

In an interview with Business Insider, Paul Weiss law firm chair Brad Karp aired his indecision about continuing in that job. With his broad-based background – for example, being also well-connected in politics – he could have landed myriad other plum positions. In that article a law firm insider was quoted as saying, given all the pressure of heading a law firm, Karp would be “crazy” to stick around. But that he did. He’s still there.

After getting ousted from OpenAI, Sam Altman made it his business to get back in. He made it clear he isn’t going elsewhere.

With so much volatility it’s proving smart to stay with what you know. That ranges from the tasks to the metrics for your performance to the machinations of the inside players. And that brings us to the disconcerting realities hovering over most of those who need/want to work for income in 2024 and beyond:

1) It’s all too easy to lose a job. Actually, the “they” could be looking for a reason to terminate you.

2) That is bound to happen if you’re 50 years or older, and

3) It’s quite challenging to find a comparable position.

Well-known is the research from Pro Publica documenting all this. Incidentally, only 10 percent will land a comparable position that pays what their previous one had.

Obviously, the tough nut to crack is holding on to what you have, especially if you are over-50.

The way some observers of the work world are starting to talk about that now mirrors the tone and content of conversations I had overheard as a child. Only the specific language incorporates the sophistication and terminology from advanced courses in business and career counseling.

My extended family and their immigrant friends who had somehow made it through The Great Depression compulsively harped on what they “had to do” in order to get and keep work. The rawness of that had been embedded in their collective consciousness.

We boomers, well, couldn’t connect with their sagas. None of that would happen to us, right. We were going to get an education. We would not have to “suck up.” We would not need “protection.” No shop steward was going to torment us. Because we would work at what we loved work wouldn’t be work.

The current transition back to pre-WWII employment values is difficult for my career coaching clients to absorb. Initially they don’t “hear” what I am saying about what it takes to keep a job. To get their attention I introduce the demeaning phrases of that earlier era. Those range from “brown-nosing” to “looking busy.”

You are right: Everything changes. The work situation is bound to do that, again and again. Until then, employees have to take the leap into the reality that there is a scarcity of Knowledge Work. If they lose it, they might not get it back.

And, no, things weren’t always rosy in the good old days of job-hopping. Summers had been ousted from Harvard.