Mid-1990s Employee Tenure — 1997-01-30

Among men, median tenure with their current employer fell between 1983 and 1996 in nearly every age group. The overall median for men remained flat at 4.0 years, however, as the age distribution of employed men shifted to older age groups, where workers have longer tenure. Median tenure for women had changed little from 1983 to 1991, but was up slightly in 1996 to 3.5 years, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. Information on tenure has been obtained periodically since the early 1950s from supplemental questions in the Current Population Survey (CPS), the monthly survey of about 50,000 households that provides information on employment, unemployment, earnings, demographics, and other characteristics of the civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. The questions on tenure that were asked prior to 1983 differ from those asked in more recent surveys. As a result, this release focuses only on comparable data from 1983 to 1996.