Jobs and Genetics - The analysis

Most of the people from my parents generation, usually would boast of decades of work experience at a single organization and at times would also mention that they had worked only for one organization through out their life!Recently I got caught to a set of old timers who were bashing our generation for switching jobs as if switching clothes.

This prompted me to do a bit more thinking on this subject and eventually I wanted to find answers to two questions.

Question 1:  Is there a genetic influence in job switching? 
That means if a parent had the habit of switching jobs has it influenced the child's job switching pattern.

From the data I collected up, I calculated Spearman's rank correlation for the average time at an organization between the child's and parent's to find that the relationship was a mere 0.30. Which is a very weak relationship. Surprisingly when I did the calculation to find out the rank correlation between the "child's highest work experience at a single org/child's total work experience" vs "parent's highest work experience at a single org/parents's total work experience"  it was a -0.05 correlation.

In simpler terms the obtained results can be interpreted as follows, just because a parent switched a lot of jobs - it cannot be taken as an indication that the child will have a higher probability of switching jobs. Secondly, just because a parent spent bulk of his career at a single organization - the child cannot be expected to spend bulk of his working life at a single organization.

2. When our generation grows old, will this generation also stop moving jobs and ultimately end up with similar statistics?
The curiosity was to find whether if this kind of job switching had been their earlier in the earlier generations  youthful days.

This analysis gave some interesting averages,

Criteria	Average in years
Average time at an organization for current generation	2.0
Average time at an organization for father's of earlier generation	12.4
Average time at an organization for mother's of earlier generation	10.7

Best part is this,

Criteria	Average in years
Average time at an organization for current generation Male	2.6
Average time at an organization for current generation Female	1.4

It's clear who has problem in making up the mind?! is it? lol

coming to the question of generation, the number of job switches our generation had made even in terms of raw numbers is higher than the parent's generation figure! So probably the boasting the next generation might be here is - I switched x number of jobs within y number of years! 

So the numbers tell me that Job switching is not a genetic thing but its a generational thing.

There are some interesting by products that has come out of this survey, will try to post them in a future post.

Above all a big thank you for those who responded to the survey. Thanks a lot!