2004 Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, and Earnings Growth: Results from a National Longitudinal Survey — 2004-08-25

The average person born in the later years of the baby boom held 10 jobs from age 18 to age 38, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. More than two-thirds of these jobs were held in the first half of the period, from ages 18 to 27. However, baby boomers continued to have a relatively large number of short-duration jobs even as they approached middle age. These findings are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a survey of 9,964 young men and women who were ages 14 to 22 when first interviewed in 1979 and ages 37 to 45 when interviewed most recently in 2002. These respondents were born in the years 1957 to 1964, the later years of the "baby boom" that occurred in the United States from 1946 to 1964.