Drama in 3 acts: How job-separation rates ended up 28% above old norms

If you’re stuck in a job that’s full of frustrations, when is it wisest to get out, so you can start the next chapter of your life no matter what? And when is it safer to stick with what you’ve got, flaws and all?

Over the past 2 ? years, U.S. workers have wrestled with those questions as never before. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic – when the U.S. economy was in freefall, hardly anyone left of their own accord. (Plenty of people did suffer involuntary layoffs.)

Turn the clock forward to the first half of 2021, and U.S. workers en masse were breaking free of jobs they didn’t like, in favor of fresh starts elsewhere. What’s now known as the Great Reshuffle was in full swing.?

And now? A new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team documents each stage of this workplace drama in three acts – including the latest twist. The newly launched LinkedIn Separation Rate is powered by data on 11.5 million employees’ departures since 2018. It covers both those who left voluntarily and those who were involuntarily terminated.

As seen in the chart above, the year-over-year variation in the U.S. Separation Rate hardly budged before the COVID-19 pandemic set in. Then it sunk as low as -25% in June 2020, when U.S. employment was at double-digit levels and severe, “shelter-in-place” restrictions were common.

By 2021, however, the U.S. economy was bouncing back, and the most intense COVID-related restraints on ordinary activity were being relaxed. Job mobility became a lot easier, and workers reacted accordingly. The separation rate’s year-over-year trend switched direction in a hurry, hitting a high of +53% in June 2021.

Looking at industry-by-industry variations, the retail sector saw the greatest fluctuations. The year-over-year percentage change in its separation rate bottomed out at -39% in June 2020, only to rocket ahead to +83% in the following June. Finance also turned out to be a sector with extreme lows and highs.?

By contrast, fluctuations in tech’s separation rate were relatively subdued. Tech workers in June 2020 weren’t all that hesitant about leaving jobs (with a slowdown in the separation rate of just -16%) and they weren’t especially eager to move on a year later, when the year-over-year separation rate peaked at +46% in August 2021.

The restless nature of U.S. workers’ mood last year was captured in a Pew Foundation survey published last month. It found people quit for three main reasons: low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and a feeling of being disrespected at work.?

These days, job departures remain brisk – and well ahead of the pre-pandemic pace – although last year’s extreme ramp-up seems to be abating. The latest reading of the separation rate, for this March, showed a year-over-year rise of 28%, well down from last summer’s highs.?

The new tempo is especially pronounced in retail (26% in March). Since the start of the pandemic, wages in retail and other frontline, “desk-less jobs” have risen 7% to 10%, a team of researchers led by management consultant Deborah Lovich recently noted in a Harvard Business Review article .

While those boosts won’t make every retail worker’s' pay frustrations vanish, highly publicized wage increases at retailers such as Target and Amazon maybe seen as a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, health care currently stands out as the sector where worker restlessness remains most intense. For March, the year-over-year rise in the separation rate remained elevated, at nearly 40%.

Methodology

The LinkedIn Separation Rate is calculated by Economic Graph researchers to measure the rate at which employees are leaving their positions. It analyzes LinkedIn member profiles to determine the number of positions that ended each month, removing seasonality and other effects. The metric is indexed to the average for 2016.

LinkedIn data scientists Cristian Jara-Figueroa and Carl Shan contributed to this report.