The average Belgian worker has four employers throughout their career and spends 11 years and four months in one role before moving on to another.
These figures are according to the latest Acerta Consult HR survey and are based on data from 340,000 employees across more than 44,000 companies.
The figures show that there has been a slight increase in job duration compared to both five and ten years ago. "The current average [time spent in one company] is nearly 4% higher than it was a decade or half a decade ago," the study highlighted.
"Despite the pandemic pushing people to rethink their jobs, the average loyalty to employers doesn't appear to have suffered," said Acerta director Benoît Caufriez. "The younger employees, who change jobs at a faster rate, don't affect the overall figure." Over 13% of people aged 24 to 35 had changed jobs between 2021 and 2022.
Finance fares best
Jobs in finance are of the longest duration. The average 18.5-year-stint recorded in 2014 has risen to 26.6 years a decade later (a 43% increase). Caufriez puts this longevity down to in-house training opportunities and balanced workloads.
"Thanks to the many training opportunities and the efforts made in terms of making work manageable, employees can generally remain active for longer in their job, even if the content of the job changes."
The commerce sector sees the shortest duration, where the 2014 average of 7.8 years spent in one position fell to 7.7 years in 2024.
The bigger the enterprise, the longer the employee's duration. In companies with more than 500 employees, the average length of time spent there is around 15.5 years (up by 9% since ten years ago). In the smaller end of SMEs, the average duration is between five and eight years.
"Belgium is an SME nation, and SMEs lack the same resources and opportunities that larger companies have in terms of job offers and development possibilities," says Caufriez.
