Can't See What's Next vs. Why Take the Shit: Staying or Leaving in Kenya and the US

🇰🇪 Kenya · 🇺🇸 United States

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A Kenyan hiring analyst summed up why the country's best employees quit in nine words: "they cannot see what is next." An anonymous American tech worker summed up the same impulse rather more bluntly on a workplace forum: "no reason to take all the shit that inevitably develop in a large company" when a better package is one application away. Different vocabulary, same verdict — staying put has to earn its keep in both places, just against very different ceilings.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇪 Kenya

🇺🇸 United States

Kenya

The Kenyan version of this story is less about restlessness than about visibility. Accretio Africa's 2025 hiring trends report, cited in reporting aimed at employers, is explicit that companies with clear promotion paths now hold a real competitive advantage in attracting and keeping talent across East and West Africa — an admission that the ceiling, not the paycheck, is usually what pushes someone out the door. NGO and public-sector employees in particular are reported to hit their grade-band ceiling within roughly three years, at which point a raise generally requires leaving rather than staying, since internal structures often have no further room to move within.

Underneath that structural ceiling sits a genuinely brutal job-seeking market: multiple accounts describe a serious oversupply of job seekers relative to open roles, with networking functioning as the dominant, almost mandatory, channel into decent positions precisely because formal recruitment agencies are reported as unresponsive once a CV is submitted. Add Nairobi's living costs rising faster than many salaries since 2023, and a persistent diaspora pull toward the UK, the Gulf, and North America for the country's most competitive professionals, and job loyalty in Kenya starts to look less like a cultural value and more like a function of how much upward room actually exists inside a given organisation. Kenya was never part of Hofstede's original research sample, so no individually published country score exists for comparison here.

United States

America's reputation for job-hopping turns out to be substantially a generational myth rather than a real behavioural shift. A National Institute on Retirement Security analysis found that workers aged 25-34 in 2024 had a median tenure of 2.7 years — barely different from the 3-year median for the same age group back in 1983. The organisation's own executive director, Dan Doonan, put it directly: "the real drivers of turnover are the economy, benefits, and job opportunities, not generational differences." The self-image gap is striking, though — a 2023 ResumeLab survey found 83% of American Gen Z workers describe themselves as job-hoppers, a perception the actual retention data doesn't really back up.

Where the real churn happens is inside specific, high-pressure employers, and workers there are unusually candid about why. On one widely discussed workplace thread, employees named burnout and poor management as the top two reasons tenure runs short — "it takes about two years to realize that your efforts are not appreciated" — alongside blunt compensation math: being "lowballed on my initial offer" and knowing "you can get better package if you switch" together make staying the financially irrational choice in a tight labour market. Hofstede's US score of 91 on individualism, the highest of any country in his original research, matches this closely: career moves are framed overwhelmingly as individual optimisation, not as loyalty owed to an employer or a team.

The Reckoning

The genuine irony is that both systems produce similar-looking behaviour — frequent job changes — for almost opposite reasons. In Kenya, movement is frequently the only available route past a hard structural ceiling in a market with far more job seekers than open roles. In America, movement is frequently a rational, almost routine optimisation in a market tight enough that switching jobs reliably out-earns staying put, especially after an initial lowball offer.

That makes "job loyalty" a genuinely confusing metric to compare across the two. A Kenyan professional who stays five years at one employer may be demonstrating loyalty, or may simply have hit a ceiling with nowhere better to go yet. An American professional who switches jobs every two years isn't necessarily disloyal by local standards — the data suggests their own parents, at the same age, moved almost as often.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com (Nairobi forum) — One frustrated job seeker summed up the practical reality of Kenya's formal hiring channels bluntly, noting that recruitment agencies like Manpower Services often "dont feedback someone" after a CV is submitted — leaving networking, not applications, as the realistic path into a serious role.

Blind — An engineer describing a demanding US tech employer called it "a pressure cooker...that wants you to work all the time," citing that environment, more than any single salary complaint, as the actual reason behind an eventual decision to leave.

Fuzu.com — Kenyan hiring research distilled the entire retention problem down to a single, quotable line aimed at employers who assume pay is the main lever: "talented people leave not because the pay is always bad, but because they cannot see what is next."

Expat.com (Nairobi forum) — A separate contributor offered a piece of advice that doubles as a quiet indictment of the formal job market's capacity: when the traditional route is this oversaturated, some job seekers are told to simply "register your own company and sell your skills to those who need them" rather than keep competing for scarce formal roles.

Conclusion

If you're trying to predict how long you'll stay somewhere, the honest framing is that both countries will eventually push you toward the exit — they just disagree on the trigger. In Kenya, the trigger is usually structural: a grade band with nowhere higher to go, in a market crowded enough that leaving is often the only visible path up. In America, the trigger is usually financial and managerial: a lowball offer, a bad manager, or the two-year mark where unappreciated effort starts to feel permanent rather than temporary.

Ask about the ceiling before you take either job — in Kenya, literally, about the promotion structure; in America, about who you'd actually be reporting to, since the data suggests that matters more than almost anything else.