Economy

Baby Boomers Were Job-Hopping Before It Was Cool

New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the notion of the "company man" died not recently, but long ago.
Andrey Zudilin/Shutterstock.com

If you haven't already bid farewell to the concept of the “company man,” you definitely missed your chance.

A new study from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the already aged concept of a "good job for life" went away long before the rise of the “job-hopping Millennial” (or Gen-X-er, for that matter). In fact, workers who hold multiple jobs in one lifetime became normal as early as the mid-1970s, with the Baby Boom generation. The BLS finds that the average American born between 1957 and 1964—the latter years of the baby boom—held nearly a dozen (11.7) jobs between the ages of 18 and 48. Job security hasn’t been a guarantee for at least the past 40 years.