Research
Your career narrative decays between jobs. The data already knew.
Median tenure is the lowest in two decades. New hires start looking in months. Static documents cannot remember a career that will not sit still.
Careers are described as ladders. The labor market describes them as short stays.
In January 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that median tenure with a current employer was 3.9 years — down from 4.1 years in 2022, and the lowest since January 2002. Workers 25–34 sit at 2.7 years. Twenty-two percent of wage and salary workers had a year or less with their current employer.
That is not a vibe. It is the shape of modern work.
People are already in motion
Indeed Hiring Lab looked at job-seeker resumes and found the median seeker had been with their current employer two years and three months. Three months into a tenure, 16% had already applied somewhere else. Across recorded work history, 57% clicked apply at some point.
The professional identity stack has not caught up.
- Resumes are frozen at the last panic.
- LinkedIn is a performance, updated when guilt spikes.
- Brag documents live in a notes app nobody opens.
- The story of the last role decays the week the laptop is returned.
The market moves. The narrative does not. Alignment is always late.
Decay is the default
A career narrative is not a document. It is a compounding record: what you shipped, what you learned, what the market started paying for, what you no longer want.
Leave that record unattended for 18 months and you do not have a positioning problem. You have amnesia. You reconstruct a self from memory under time pressure, then wonder why interviews feel like auditions for a part you used to know.
This is why “I’ll update my resume when I need it” is a strategy for being behind. By the time you need it, the market has already repriced the skills you forgot to name.
Infrastructure vs. the next scramble
The honest response to shorter tenure is not “job-search harder.” It is stop treating identity as an event.
A living profile does not wait for a layoff. It logs wins while they are still true. It notices when a role’s skill graph drifts. It keeps a version of you that can be expressed tomorrow without a weekend of archaeology.
That is what Terraces is for: not a better snapshot, a system that does not let the story rot between moves.
If the labor market will not sit still, neither should the record of who you are.