Turnover rates, retention strategies, tenure – different terms circling the same issue. How long do people stay in their jobs?

A global view discussed in Welcome to the world of job-hopping, finds:

According to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, while Greeks workers tend to stay put for 13 years, French employees for 12 and Germans for a decade, workers in Britain and Ireland have a devil-may-care approach to job mobility. Yet neither is as mobile as Americans, who move jobs on average every four years.

Among senior executives, the expectations are more traditional, according to an Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) study.

Of the European executives surveyed, 39% had worked for their current organisation for between two and five years, with 51% estimating they will have worked for between four and seven organisations by the end of their career. Forty percent of Europeans stated that a quarter of the senior management staff at their current organisation had been with the company for less than five years.

Conversely, the College Student Career Confidence Survey of recent college graduates and college students throughout the U.S found:

• 61% of college students expect to remain with their first employers for less than three years.
• Only 16% anticipate continuing to change jobs as quickly throughout their careers.
• Instead, 34% said they plan to change jobs every 3 to 4 years, and 50% expect to switch employers every 5 years or longer.

And consider the lightning speed job changes of “Generation Sean” striving for 52 jobs in 52 weeks!

The risk for losing employees is ever present according to The Walker Loyalty Report for Loyalty in the Workplace, 2007, which found:

Although the percentage of truly loyal employees – 34 percent – is unchanged from 2005, the percentage of high-risk employees (36 percent) now outnumbers those who are truly loyal. (High-risk employees plan to leave their current employer within the next two years.)

So you should be focusing on retention strategies at all levels of your workplace or your employees may be the ones singing Hello, I Must Be Going.