One Employer, One Life: Australia's Job-Hugging Habit Meets the Netherlands' Serial Career Monogamy

🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In February 2025, just under eight percent of employed Australians changed jobs — the lowest job mobility rate in almost fifty years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the average worker logs a career spanning 43.8 years, the longest working life in Europe, while treating any single employer as a fairly disposable chapter within it. Somewhere between these two facts sits the real question for anyone relocating for work: does staying put still pay, or has the market quietly voted for musical chairs?

Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇦🇺 Australia

The ABS's most recent figures describe a country that has, for the moment, stopped moving. Job mobility fell for a second consecutive year to just under 8 percent in the year to February 2025 — roughly 1.1 million people out of 14.3 million employed — the lowest rate in close to five decades. Fifty-seven percent of the workforce has been in its current job less than five years, but only 17 percent less than one, and mobility is heavily concentrated among the young: workers aged 15–24 change jobs at around 12 percent a year, against roughly 1 percent for those over 65. LinkedIn's 2026 Workforce Report gives this trend a name — "job hugging" — noting that only 51 percent of Australians plan to look for new work this year, down from 59 percent in 2025, with 69 percent saying the search itself has become harder.

What makes this interesting is that Australia's institutions were built for loyalty long before the market decided to cooperate. Long service leave, administered under state law and confirmed by the Fair Work Ombudsman, grants paid leave after 7 to 15 years of continuous service depending on jurisdiction — in New South Wales, roughly 8.7 weeks after ten years, with more accruing every five years after that. It is a genuinely unusual entitlement by global standards, and it exists precisely because staying was once assumed to be the default. The market, however, still pays a premium for leaving: industry analysis from CPA Australia's INTHEBLACK and career site Jora puts typical incremental raises for staying around 3 percent annually, against 15–20 percent for a lateral move. Australians are currently choosing security over that premium anyway — less out of conviction than out of the sense, per LinkedIn's data, that the alternative is riskier than it used to be.

🇳🇱 Netherlands

The Dutch system does not really allow for indefinite loyalty even when a worker wants it. Under the ketenregeling, employers can offer at most three consecutive fixed-term contracts (or three years, whichever comes first) before they must convert a role to permanent or let the person go — a structural deadline baked directly into the law rather than left to sentiment. CBS reports that 27 percent of Dutch employees are on temporary contracts, the highest share anywhere in Europe, and that more than half of workers who change jobs move into an entirely different sector, not just a different employer. For anyone arriving from a market where switching industries is treated as a résumé red flag, that is a genuine culture shock.

And yet the aggregate outcome cuts against the "restless Dutch worker" stereotype: Eurostat-based figures reported by CBS-adjacent outlets show Dutch workers averaging 43.8 years in the labour force, more than six years longer than the EU average of 37.2, and OECD data notes that the over-55 cohort in the Netherlands has among the highest odds in Europe of still holding the same job five years on. The mobility, in other words, is front-loaded and employer-specific, not lifelong. For migrant workers this mobility is legally accommodated rather than punished: those on a highly skilled migrant visa typically retain a window — often three months, sometimes considerably longer — to find new work after a dismissal, per Business.gov.nl and Amsterdam's official expat portal, and those on the 30% tax ruling must simply resign themselves to job-hunting on a clock if they want to keep it.

The Reckoning

Here is the paradox worth sitting with: Australia built the institutions of loyalty — long service leave, award-based tenure, a labour market small enough that reputations follow you — and then its workers largely stopped needing to be persuaded to stay, mobility having collapsed to a 50-year low for reasons that have nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with economic nerves. The Netherlands built the institutions of churn — a legal three-year cap on temporary status, a workforce where switching sectors is unremarkable — and produced, in aggregate, the longest working lives in Europe. The country famous for flexibility ends up with the most durable careers; the country famous for the "fair go" is currently too anxious to test the market it is, on paper, well positioned to leave.

For a relocating professional this reframes the decision less as a personality question and more as a jurisdiction question. Hofstede's country comparison offers a sliver of explanation for the underlying temperament: Australia scores as a strongly individualist, indulgent culture (Individualism 73, Indulgence 71, per Hofstede Insights), while the Netherlands pairs comparably high individualism with a notably low Masculinity score, reflecting a workplace built around consensus rather than competitive advancement. But contract law does more work than culture here. In Australia, patience with one employer currently reads as market savvy rather than a lack of ambition. In the Netherlands, tenure is measured in single digits by design, regardless of what the worker personally intends.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Whirlpool Forums (Australia) — a poster who stayed with one employer for 35 years said there was never a reason to leave once the role remained satisfying and pay kept climbing on its own.

Whirlpool Forums (Australia) — another contributor, settled into a comfortable role for barely a year, admitted to still browsing job listings out of habit, conceding that with kids at home, every potential move now carries real risk rather than being a low-stakes experiment.

Quora — a respondent to a thread on regretting job-hopping argued the opposite regret was more common: years spent loyal to one employer while peers who switched every two to three years quietly pulled ahead on salary.

Blind — a Booking.com employee based in Amsterdam described the trade-off bluntly: strong pay by Dutch standards and genuinely balanced hours, offset by a promotion ladder that flattens hard past senior engineer, turning long tenure into something closer to a comfortable stall.

InterNations Expat Insider survey respondents — ranked the Netherlands near the top of the world for job security and work culture, then immediately undercut the praise by flagging that the housing shortage made staying near the job almost as hard as finding it.

Conclusion

The honest synthesis is that these two systems are optimizing against different failure states. Australia is currently protecting against instability by simply not moving, even though its own wage data still rewards those who do — job security there has become a matter of following the herd rather than defying it, and the long service leave clock remains a real, if slow-burning, reason to stay. The Netherlands has engineered mobility directly into its contract law, so a newcomer should treat the two-to-three-year horizon as the default setting rather than a personal failing — and should notice that Dutch workers have built unusually long, secure careers around that instability, not despite it.

For someone actually choosing between the two: pick Australia if you want something close to institutional permanence and are prepared to mind the long service leave calendar; pick the Netherlands if you want a system that assumes you'll eventually leave and simply doesn't hold it against you. Either way, loyalty turns out to be a policy setting rather than a personality trait — choose the jurisdiction whose settings already match the personality you're prepared to fake.