The Stats Guy: Gen Z is the most loyal workforce Australia ever had
It may costs them “aura points” but when it comes to long-term jobs, it turns out younger workers are more loyal than previous generations of workers, writes Simon Kuestenmacher.
There is no shortage of headlines proclaiming how young people (gen Z to be exact) are job-hopping like never before, frequently switching industries as they chase fulfilment and purpose.
For instance, ABC News reported that “gen Z and millennials are job hopping much more frequently than their boomer bosses in the pursuit of happiness”.
On LinkedIn, experts talk confidently about economies needing to prepare students and graduates for careers across multiple industries and jobs.
Why are young people changing jobs so often? The explanations usually go something like this:
Gen Z reject the corporate grind. They obsess about meaning, flexibility and fulfilment instead of traditional rewards. Deloitte research suggests that gen Z and millennials prioritise purpose and wellbeing in employment decisions.
Further, our young workers are much more aware of the impact that a poor working environment has on their mental health. With this awareness they seek medical help for mental health reasons much more frequently and are more frequently diagnosed with a mental health condition.
Your job is making you sick? Change your job!
General career advice also reinforces frequent job moves. Experts in the news and on LinkedIn regularly remind us that switching jobs every few years ultimately translates into higher career earnings.
It’s easier (and less awkward) to snatch a new job with higher pay than to negotiate for higher pay with your current boss.
After young people have been told for the past few decades that they will have to change jobs frequently to improve their income and happiness, they surely just change jobs automatically.
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Before I forget, the growth of casual and part-time roles has forced many young workers into holding multiple jobs.
While these additional jobs are rarely exciting passion projects but rather a means to increase incomes in expensive times, these casual jobs nonetheless should drive up the job mobility rate.
So far, the narrative is pretty simple – the only problem is that the data tells a very different story.
As it turns out, the Australian Bureau of Statistics dutifully collects data on job mobility. The dataset counts the employed people who switched employer or business (or change industry or occupation) within the past 12 months.
The latest figures for 2025 show that just 8 cent of employed people changed employer or business, down from about 13 per cent in the mid-1990s.
Breaking this data down by age cohorts is where the fun really begins though.
Among workers aged 15-24, job mobility sits at a mere 11.5 per cent. That’s a substantial drop from 23 per cent back in 1996.
Let’s make this a bit more personal: A gen Z worker born in 2001 is 24 years old and only half as likely as his gen X boss (of a 1972 vintage) was to change their job in 1996 when they were 24.
Today’s bosses must rethink their ideas of job mobility. Based on my chats with CEOs and senior leaders at the conferences I present at every week, I am pretty sure most bosses assume that their young staff change jobs much more frequently than they did – the exact opposite is the case.
We must constantly rethink our thinking and revisit our assumptions.
Writing a news story about job mobility (like the ABC story I quoted in the opening paragraph) without looking at available job mobility data is lazy journalism.
I don’t want to see news stories that are based on surveys about intentions. I don’t care how often people think they will change their job – I want the data to tell me how often they do change their job.
We now find ourselves in the unexpected reality of young workers (15-24) being more loyal employees than ever (or at least less likely to change their jobs). It’s time to figure out why job mobility plunged.
I must yet again point the finger at the housing affordability crisis. Changing household structures and a few other social trends are also to blame.
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When housing is expensive, job mobility suffers. For starters, young workers who might once have moved cities to chase better opportunities are now tied to their current location because buying and even renting elsewhere has become prohibitively uncertain and costly.
A generation ago, moving from Adelaide to Sydney (before chasing the sunshine in Queensland) or mobbing from Hobart to Melbourne (and back again) was a more common career-building step.
With expensive housing, homeowners are more shackled to their current city than before.
Selling a property and re-entering the market in another city exposes them to exorbitant stamp duty, transaction costs, and the risk of being permanently priced out if they can’t buy back in.
Renting isn’t a simple alternative either as super low vacancy rates and soaring rents mean relocating often requires months of searching, higher upfront costs, while navigating a competitive rental market.
Taken together, these housing pressures make workers more cautious. Even if an exciting job offer comes along, the hurdle of finding affordable accommodation discourages mobility.
Instead of following jobs, workers increasingly stay put, hoping local opportunities emerge. This way, workers swim in a shallower opportunity pool.
We also don’t get fired nearly as often as we did in the past. Fewer layoffs mean fewer forced moves.
Nationally, retrenchments have collapsed from about 7 per cent in the recession-scarred early 1990s to under 2 per cent today. Back then, employers shed staff en masse as interest rates soared and the economy contracted.
In contrast, today’s ultra-low unemployment makes it hard to replace workers, so businesses are reluctant to let people go (even if they’re underperforming – that might be one reason why the term quiet quitting entered the lexicon).
Stronger labour protections have also made dismissals more costly and complex. The result is a stickier workforce where employers hold on to staff and workers face far fewer forced job changes – that further drives down labour mobility figures.
As female workforce participation keeps going up, more households draw dual incomes. Once two people share the earning responsibilities, they are much less likely to pack up and move cities because relocation now means finding two suitable jobs instead of one.
In past decades a single breadwinner’s career could justify a family move. Today, a household must secure two positions in the same new place at the same time. This essentially doubles the risk and complexity, making families far more cautious about chasing opportunities in a new city.
There is one more culprit that I can think of. Jobs that require licenses, certifications or long training pathways drag down job mobility because they are harder to walk away from.
An electrician, for example, can’t simply pivot into another career without retraining and re-qualifying. The upfront investment of apprenticeships and accreditation, combined with strict regulatory frameworks, locks people into their profession and makes them far less likely to switch occupations compared to workers in less regulated fields.
Over the past decades, more jobs have created barriers around them in an attempt to professionalise the occupation – just think about how financial planners moved from essentially being unregulated to a highly regulated profession. That’s a positive development but it did also contribute to lower job mobility figures.
Despite prevailing narratives in the news and on LinkedIn, young Australians aren’t hopping between jobs like never before. In fact, job mobility among young workers is at an all-time low, and they’re likely to continue to remain entrenched in their roles.
Housing pressures, fewer layoffs, and more difficult transitions (due to dual income households becoming ever more common) suggest that the predictions of our young workers cycling through ow so many jobs and industries throughout their careers won’t ever be true.
Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.
