2026 09 27_07_belgium vs indonesia_job loyalty vs career mobility

Eleven Years or Eleven Months: How Long You're Supposed to Stay in Brussels vs. Jakarta

🇧🇪 Belgium · 🇮🇩 Indonesia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The average Belgian stays with an employer for 11.3 years and changes jobs roughly four times in an entire career — a pace so unhurried that Belgian statisticians felt the need to specifically note that younger "job hoppers" entering the market have not yet managed to drag that number down. In Indonesia, where youth unemployment runs at roughly 16% (more than triple the national rate) and over half the workforce sits in informal employment with no contract or protections, frequent job-switching isn't a lifestyle choice broadcast on a resume. It's frequently the closest thing to career strategy available to someone stuck underemployed relative to their own education.

Do's & Don'ts

🇧🇪 Belgium

🇮🇩 Indonesia

Belgium's loyalty culture is real and, per national statistics, quietly increasing rather than eroding: average tenure per employer rose from 10.9 years in 2014 to 11.3 years today, a 4% increase that outpaced expectations that younger workers entering the market would drag the average down (VRT NWS). Large companies see even longer average tenure — 15.5 years — while SMEs see faster turnover, and even the disruption of the pandemic, which prompted widespread reflection on work generally, left Belgian employer loyalty essentially unmoved. It's a labor market where staying put isn't passive; it's the strategy, reinforced by the country's own compensation norms (a company car and benefits often matter more than the base number, given Belgium's steep marginal tax rates) that make switching jobs purely for salary a less obviously rational move than it looks on paper.

Indonesia's mobility is less a cultural preference than a structural response to a genuinely difficult labor market. Roughly 16% of Indonesians aged 15-24 are unemployed — more than double the national rate and among the highest youth-joblessness figures in Asia, well above regional peers like Thailand and Vietnam (Great Place To Work Indonesia). An estimated 56% of the workforce holds informal employment with no stable contract, protections, or development pathway, and educational curricula are widely reported to be misaligned with what employers actually need. Indonesia's Hofstede profile helps explain the response to this pressure: an Individualism score of just 14 — among the lowest recorded anywhere — reflects a strongly collectivist culture built on extended family and group loyalty (International Business Center), which is precisely why job mobility here so often runs through personal networks and family connections rather than open competitive application, even as individual tenure at any single employer stays short.

The Reckoning: Belgium's stability is a function of a mature, well-regulated labor market where switching jobs offers diminishing marginal returns once tax and benefits structures are accounted for; Indonesia's mobility is a function of an immature, informal-heavy labor market where staying in one underpaying role offers almost no upside at all. Neither country's workers are behaving irrationally — they're both optimizing correctly for the market they're actually in. The mistake a newcomer makes is assuming either behavior reflects individual character (ambition, loyalty, restlessness) rather than the incentive structure underneath it.

The sharper irony: Indonesia's famously high collectivism — extended family ties, group loyalty as a defining cultural value — coexists with a labor market where individual job tenure is often short and unstable, precisely because that collectivist network is what makes moving between jobs survivable and findable in the first place. Belgium's comparatively individualist, transactional labor market produces the opposite outcome: genuinely long, stable, institution-anchored careers. Group-oriented culture drives individual mobility; individualist culture drives institutional loyalty. It's backwards from what either country's own cultural self-description would predict.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com Belgium forum — On a thread about whether to push for a raise after three years of stagnant pay despite eight years of IT experience, one respondent diagnosed the real dynamic rather than the stated question: taking three years to even learn about a special expat tax status suggested "that you were satisfied with your situation" — comfort, not incompetence, as the actual barrier to career movement.

Expat.com Belgium forum — A different contributor on the same thread offered a specific tactical fix: given Belgium's progressive taxation, "it's a lot smarter to negotiate additional benefits like the company car and others" than to chase a higher net number directly.

Personal essay, Medium — A Indonesian writer described the psychological toll behind the job-switching statistics directly: underemployed graduates increasingly feel their "education was a wasted investment," describing themselves as "stuck in an unfair system" — frequent job changes and even emigration follow from that disappointment, not from a taste for variety.

Expat.com Jakarta forum — Answering a foreigner's question about finding work, one contributor cut straight to the real mechanism: "it's easier to get a job if you have connection" — a blunt, practical confirmation that Indonesia's collectivist networks function as the real hiring infrastructure, formal job boards notwithstanding.

Expat.com Jakarta forum — Another contributor was equally blunt about the foreign-hire ceiling: "jobs for foreigners in Indonesia are not readily available by any stretch of the imagination," with permits generally restricted to skills genuinely unavailable among locals.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Belgium, plan your career the way locals do — in long chapters, with negotiation happening inside the relationship rather than by leaving it. If you're moving to Indonesia, build your network before you build your resume; it will do more for your career mobility than any application ever will. The two countries aren't teaching opposite lessons about ambition so much as opposite lessons about where the leverage actually sits — in the institution, or in the people around you.