1998 Employee Tenure — 1998-09-23

The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer (referred to as employee tenure) was 3.6 years in February 1998, edging down from 3.8 years in February 1996, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported. Among men, median employee tenure decreased for most age groups, as it did in 1996. Among women, overall tenure changed little from 1996 to 1998. Information on tenure has been obtained periodically since the early 1950s from supplemental questions in the Current Population Survey (CPS), a 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 data from 1983 to 1998.