Long tenure is not a virtue

One of the stranger habits in company culture is the way organisations boast about how long people have stayed. Ten years. Fifteen years. Entire decks built around the supposed virtue of longevity, as though time served were inherently impressive. It can be. It can also mean almost nothing at all. Ten years at one company is not a badge of honour by default. It is simply a fact, and facts need interpretation.

"Ten years at one company is not a badge of honour by default. It is simply a fact."

This matters because labour markets do not behave as though staying put is the universal ideal. In the United States, the median tenure with a current employer was 3.9 years in January 2024, and only 3.5 years in the private sector. That is not a labour market organised around decade-long stays as the norm. The OECD goes further: job-to-job mobility is a key driver of wage and productivity growth, contributing around 0.9 percentage points annually on average between 2000 and 2019. In other words, movement is not merely personal restlessness. It is part of how people and economies progress.

That is why I do not see "this person has been here for ten years" as a meaningful signal on its own. The real question is: what happened during those ten years?

Did the person keep stretching? Did they reinvent themselves? Did they move across domains, functions or levels of responsibility? Did their judgement deepen because they kept confronting new complexity? Or did they simply become more fluent in one company's local language?

Those are not the same thing.

Familiarity is not the same as growth

Long tenure does create advantages. Deep context matters. Institutional memory matters. Knowing how a system really works, rather than how it is described in onboarding decks, is often valuable. Nobody sensible would deny that.

But familiarity also flatters people. It reduces friction in ways that can be mistaken for capability. A person who has spent a decade inside one company may look extraordinarily effective in that environment partly because they know every shortcut, every stakeholder, every historical scar and every unwritten rule. Remove the environment, and the market value of that effectiveness is not always what the company imagines.

That is one reason organisations overrate long tenure. They confuse local adaptation with broad capability.

The OECD's recent work on older workers is useful here. It notes that workers who stay in the same job for longer are more likely to develop job-specific skills, but also that workers with longer tenure are less likely to be learning by doing, even after controlling for internal mobility within the company. That is an important distinction. Deep tenure can increase specificity while reducing learning velocity.

That is not a moral failing. It is a risk.

Mobility is often a sign of development, not disloyalty

There is still a slightly old-fashioned idea in many companies that movement is suspect. If somebody changes jobs every few years, the assumption is that they are fickle, disloyal or insufficiently committed. If somebody stays for a decade, the assumption is that they are stable, mature and high-value.

The data does not support such a simple story.

The Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker showed in February 2026 that wage growth for job switchers was 4.7%, compared with 3.6% for non-switchers. OECD research similarly describes job-to-job mobility as a potentially important channel for career advancement as well as aggregate wage and productivity growth. Its 2024 report on career mobility in the United Kingdom adds that voluntary mobility can improve job satisfaction, skills use and productivity.

That is not what a pathology looks like.

It is what a labour market looks like when people move toward better fit, better learning, better firms and better opportunities.

"The problem is not mobility. The problem is stagnation disguised as loyalty."

Companies often brag about tenure because it sounds safer than saying what they have actually developed

Long tenure is easy to market internally. It creates the appearance of stability. It sounds like proof of culture. It implies belonging, loyalty and retention. The issue is that none of those things necessarily tell you whether the company is producing sharper thinkers, broader operators or better leaders.

A company that truly wants to boast about its people should be able to say something more interesting than "they stayed".

It should be able to say: they grew across multiple levels of scope. They took on harder problems over time. They moved across contexts and succeeded again. They became more commercially rigorous. They broadened their judgement. They stayed because the company kept stretching them, not because inertia did.

That is a much higher bar.

Because tenure, by itself, is an empty statistic. It tells you duration, not trajectory.

"Tenure tells you duration, not trajectory."

The real question is not how long somebody stayed, but how much range they built

This is particularly true in product, strategy and leadership roles.

These are not jobs where mere repetition is enough. The strongest people in these roles usually build range by encountering different business models, team dynamics, customer problems, operating cadences and organisational pathologies. They learn what travels well across contexts and what only works in one local environment.

That is why external movement can be so valuable. It forces decontextualisation. It tests whether the person can still perform once the old shorthand disappears. It reveals whether their judgement is portable or merely familiar.

McKinsey's 2025 work on building new businesses hints at the same logic from the employer side: when companies need new technologies or new ways of working, an external hire may bring the fresh perspective and expertise required. That is not an argument against internal growth. It is a reminder that fresh context is often part of how organisations learn.

The same is true for individuals.

If you never leave, never rotate, never stretch beyond one set of assumptions, one culture and one operating model, you may become deeply experienced — but in a narrower way than you think.

Long tenure only becomes impressive when it contains reinvention

To be clear, I am not arguing that people should move constantly or treat every company as a short stop. Long tenure can be deeply impressive when it contains real reinvention.

If somebody has been at one company for ten years but spent those years repeatedly widening scope, changing domains, learning new capabilities, leading through materially different phases, and remaining meaningfully challenged, that is a very different story from somebody who simply remained.

The issue is not the number.

It is whether the years compound.

And that is what companies often fail to say when they boast about tenure. They celebrate the duration instead of the development. They treat staying as if it were the same thing as growing. It is not.

A person can stay for ten years and become extraordinary. A person can stay for ten years and become locally fluent but strategically stale. A person can leave every three years and become scattered. A person can leave every three years and become unusually sharp, broad and adaptable.

Time does not decide which of those stories is true. The shape of the learning does.

"Long tenure only becomes impressive when it contains reinvention."

A better way to think about careers

The healthier question for both companies and individuals is not "how long did they stay?" It is something more demanding.

What did this period of work make them capable of that they were not capable of before?

That is the real measure.

If the answer is substantial, the tenure may have been excellent. If the answer is thin, the length of stay is largely irrelevant.

This is one reason the current obsession with long tenure strikes me as misguided. It rewards visible permanence more readily than it rewards portable capability. It treats continuity as evidence when continuity may simply be comfort.

And in a world where technologies, business models and markets shift quickly, comfort is not a particularly strong signal.

A better labour-market story would recognise that mobility, when voluntary and well judged, is often a sign of development. The OECD says as much directly: mobility can improve job satisfaction, skills use and productivity. That is a far more useful lens than the stale morality tale in which staying is virtuous and leaving is suspect.

Long tenure is not a virtue.

It is only impressive when something meaningful happened inside it.