A Quarter of Croatians Stay at One Job 20+ Years — the Rest Already Left the Country Entirely

🇭🇷 Croatia · 🇲🇳 Mongolia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Croatia's job market has two populations that barely resemble each other: one that stays at a single employer for decades, and one that's already boarded a flight to Dublin or Munich and isn't coming back. Mongolia's job market has almost the opposite problem — genuine loyalty and community values run deep, but the economy hasn't generated enough well-paid roles to reward staying, so mobility often means "abroad" here too, just for very different reasons.

Do's & Don'ts

🇭🇷 Croatia

🇲🇳 Mongolia

Croatia's tenure numbers tell a genuinely two-track story. On one hand, job stability among those who stay is remarkably high by regional standards: more than a quarter of all Croatian workers have held their current job for more than 20 years, and another fifth have 10-to-20-year tenures — figures well above the norm even among developed economies, let alone other post-transition ones. On the other hand, since EU accession in 2013, Croatia has experienced what its own prime minister has publicly called an "existential" brain-drain crisis, with university graduates living in other EU countries representing a share of the domestic university population in the double digits — compared to roughly 1.5% for a country like Spain. Total Croatia News's own reporting frames this as Europe's second-largest brain drain after Malta's demographic crisis, concentrated specifically in IT, healthcare, and engineering, driven by the pull of higher wages and stronger career ladders abroad combined with domestic push factors like professional stagnation and limited innovation investment.

Mongolia's story is less about a binary "stay forever or leave the country" split and more about a labor market that hasn't generated enough of the right kind of jobs. The World Bank's Mongolia Jobs Diagnostic found that nearly 60% of jobs created between 2010 and 2020 were in sectors paying below the median wage, while the higher-paying sectors — mining and construction — have not been major sources of new job creation, leaving a structural mismatch between where growth happens and where good jobs actually appear. Culturally, workplace loyalty runs genuinely deep — Higher.Careers' guide to the country's best employers describes a defining feature as the blend of traditional values (community, respect, loyalty) with more modern management practice, not a replacement of one by the other. But that loyalty exists inside a market where, per Quora accounts from working foreigners, career advancement specifically isn't the reason most expatriates come — personal ties to the country or to a Mongolian partner are cited far more often than ambition.

The Reckoning: Both countries have real loyalty cultures undercut by real structural limitations, but the limitation sits in a different place. In Croatia, loyalty is genuinely rewarded for those who stay in the right sector and firm — but the ceiling on wages and advancement relative to the rest of the EU means the most mobile, skilled workers self-select out of the country entirely rather than job-hop domestically. In Mongolia, the limitation isn't really the ceiling on any individual job — it's that the well-paying sectors (mining, construction) simply aren't generating enough new roles to absorb ambitious workers, so mobility ambitions get redirected either abroad or into an underpaying majority of the job market. A manager importing a "reward tenure with promotions" playbook from Croatia into Mongolia might find there simply aren't enough open senior roles to promote into. A manager importing "compete on wages to prevent churn" from Mongolia into Croatia will find that Zagreb salaries are competing against Berlin and Dublin, not just against the firm down the street.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A foreigner who'd worked in Mongolia for roughly five years wrote candidly that most expats they knew were there because they loved the country or a Mongolian partner, not because Mongolia offered strong career advancement or high pay by international standards — a distinction they said newcomers chasing a resume-building stint abroad should understand clearly before committing.

Tripadvisor (Ulaanbaatar expat forum) — A poster working locally described the practical friction of coordinating with an offshore HR department that didn't understand Mongolia's specific labor conditions — extreme winter cold disrupting schedules, a workforce skill gap in some sectors — as a bigger day-to-day source of frustration than any cultural mismatch around loyalty or ambition.

Total Croatia News (personal emigration profile) — The piece followed Petra Pajdaković, a former Croatian National Television journalist who left a stable media career to become a freelance consultant in Dublin, citing corruption and lack of professional progress at home — an account the outlet frames as broadly representative of the specific push factors driving Croatia's skilled emigration, not an outlier case.

ResearchGate (Croatian brain-drain and education-policy study, citing interviews with affected professionals) — The study's interview-based findings pointed to a specific psychological pattern among departing Croatian professionals: many described feeling loyal to Croatia personally while feeling no comparable loyalty to the domestic labor market itself, a distinction the authors argued policy responses had largely failed to address.

Higher.Careers (Mongolia workplace guide, drawing on employer case profiles) — Employers held up as "best workplaces" in the guide's own reporting consistently cited blending traditional communal values with modern HR practice — flexible scheduling layered onto strong intergenerational respect norms — as the actual retention strategy, rather than compensation alone, which most acknowledged they couldn't compete on globally.

Conclusion

If you're hiring in Croatia, the real competition for your best people isn't across the street — it's across the EU, and only genuine investment in pay and growth keeps them from leaving the country outright. If you're hiring in Mongolia, the real constraint isn't loyalty — it's that there simply aren't enough well-paying senior roles for that loyalty to climb into. What I'd tell a friend weighing either move for their own career: in Zagreb, ask what happens to people who stay 10 years; in Ulaanbaatar, ask what happens to people who came for something other than the job — because in both places, that's the more honest question.