It’s definitely anti-trend. As more companies downsize, relocate, shift, merge, absorb, reorganize and change, the chances that an employee will stay with a company for longer than a few years is becoming a rarity.
Companies that formerly boasted to employees that their jobs are “as secure as working for the government” are now ushering those same employees to change management seminars before forcing them into early retirement with an enticing severance package. Others quote corporate mythology that you haven’t arrived until you’ve worked for six companies or been fired at least once.
But some tenacious working women have survived takeovers, management overhauls and re-evaluations and fought the newly emerged stigma of staying put with a company where they enjoy what they do.
“Staying put is still highly valued in some work cultures,” says Barbara Reinhold, author of “Toxic Work: How To Overcome Stress, Overload And Burnout & Revitalize Your Career” (Dutton, $23.95). In arenas such as government, universities, health administration and nonprofits, Reinhold says, workers are “rewarded for having been there a long time.” Still, she suggests, staying with a single employer for an entire career should be an individual decision.
Working women ages 16 and over stay a median of 3.8 years at the same job, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics study of 60,000 households in 1991. Men in that same age group have a median tenure at one job of 5.1 years. At the time of the most recent study, one in 10 workers — male and female — had been with one job 20 years or more, according to Larry Leith, bureau economist. The largest percentage of working women, or 43 percent of the women ages 25 to 44 years old, stay a median of two to six years on any one job, the study shows.
The gold watch at the end of the rainbow mentality of generations past has disappeared from the workplace today, replaced by widespread workplace uncertainty, says Reinhold.
Judy Bennett is a part of the 10 percent of workers who stay more than 20 years at one company. “It’s never been boring,” says Bennett, 51, a worldwide team leader for IBM, she has worked for 24 years. Traveling internationally to set up pricing tools from her home base in Chicago, Bennett says that within IBM she has had more than a dozen jobs, which have all been challenging and interesting.
Bennett, who began her IBM career in technical marketing support, says that even though she has stayed with the same employer, “I’ve changed jobs more than most people who have changed companies.”
Jean Capellos has been a teacher at Barrington High School for 28 years. Now teaching global studies and 20th Century history, Capellos says, “It is very rewarding to have students and their siblings and now to have children of students.
“Staying in the system over the years you get used to the system and know it well and it has helped me become a better teacher.”
“Psychological hardiness” is a trait that workers who can survive new management, mergers, shift and changes possess, says Reinhold, director of career development at Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., and also head of her own consulting firm. “These are loyal, strategic survivors, voices of optimism, little bursts of heroism.”
Mary Anne Mellow is a 39-year-old attorney and partner in a St. Louis law firm where she has been working for the last 12 years. To her, remaining with the same law firm makes sense on many levels, personally and financially. “I’m pretty loyal and the reason I’ve stayed is because I’ve got autonomy and I’m treated fairly. We get a lot of good cases and it’s interesting.”
She adds, “I don’t have the idea that the grass is greener somewhere else.”
But even in the times when the prevailing image of staying put at one company has a vague implication of worker inertia, Reinhold says leaving a company for the sake of leaving is a decision that should not be taken lightly. Some key questions need to be answered. Reinhold suggests asking yourself if you are feeling happy, feeling challenged and still believe in the institution, its products and services. “If the answer is yes to all these,” Reinhold says,”there is no reason to leave.”
“It’s a hard market out there,” adds Capellos, the Barrington teacher of nearly three decades. When an environment is a rewarding one, she says, “very few are leaving.”
