Stay Forever or Leave in Two Years: Loyalty Math in Zambia and Vietnam

🇿🇲 Zambia · 🇻🇳 Vietnam

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Zambia, 93 percent of employed young people work informally, which is a polite statistical way of saying the concept of "job loyalty" barely applies when there's no formal job to be loyal to. In Vietnam, Gen Z professionals average 2.2 years per role and nearly a third say they're actively planning their next move within two years — not because the economy is unstable, but because it's working exactly as designed. One country's mobility problem is structural precarity; the other's is a functioning labor market that simply never promised anyone permanence.

Do's & Don'ts

🇿🇲 Zambia

🇻🇳 Vietnam

Zambia: loyalty without a ladder

Zambia's labor statistics tell a story less about reluctance to change jobs and more about the absence of the kind of job that loyalty is even built around. The ILO's Zambia country brief finds that only 29.5 percent of young wage earners hold a written employment agreement, with the rest working on oral arrangements that are, functionally, revocable at will. Forty-five percent work limited-duration contracts, over a third of those under twelve months, and the informal sector absorbs 93 percent of employed youth — a figure that has barely moved in a decade. Youth labour underutilization, a composite measure covering unemployment, irregular work, and discouraged non-searchers, sits above 70 percent.

Against that backdrop, "career mobility" in the Western sense — switching formal employer to formal employer for a title bump — is a option available mainly to a thin layer of professionals in Lusaka's foreign-investment and development sectors, the kind of people an Expat.com forum thread shows arriving from Portugal to run agricultural private-equity portfolios or from South Africa to open wellness clinics. For most Zambians, the live question isn't whether to stay loyal to an employer; it's whether a side venture — farming, a trade, a small retail business — offers more durable income than any single job ever could. Loyalty, in other words, is rarely the constraint. Access to a formal ladder worth being loyal to is.

Vietnam: a market built for leaving

Vietnam has gone the other direction entirely: a labor market sophisticated enough that job-switching has become the primary mechanism for wage growth, and employers know it. RMIT University's 2025 workforce research puts average tenure at 2.2 years for Gen Z, 3.2 for Millennials, and 4.3 for Gen X — a generational gradient that maps almost exactly onto how aggressively each cohort treats external offers as leverage. Around 77 percent of Vietnamese workers in one national survey described themselves as open to new opportunities at any given time, a number that would read as a crisis in a Japanese or German HR department and reads, in Ho Chi Minh City, as Tuesday.

What drives the churn isn't primarily money. Dr. Erhan Atay of RMIT, studying the phenomenon directly, points to seniority-based promotion systems that reward "years served" over performance, and to "toxic workplace cultures characterised by micromanaging, rigidity, or communication breakdown" as bigger attrition drivers than base pay. A Blind thread on job-hopping norms, while focused on Western tech, captures the logic that's gone global in knowledge work generally: under five years of experience, job-hopping isn't a red flag, it's the expected method of finding fit — and Vietnamese professionals, operating in one of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing talent markets, have simply applied that logic systematically.

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't loyalty versus disloyalty — it's what each country's instability is for. Zambia's job mobility, where it exists at all, is a hedge against a formal sector too thin to rely on; people build parallel income streams because no single job is secure enough to bet on. Vietnam's job mobility is a bet placed from a position of relative strength: professionals leave good jobs for better ones because the market has enough demand to reward it, and staying put is, if anything, the riskier financial choice.

The irony cuts the other way too: a Zambian worker with a stable formal job is statistically unusual enough to be genuinely loyal to it, because the alternative is a worse, less formal arrangement — while a Vietnamese worker staying in one role for five years is increasingly the outlier, viewed less as admirably loyal than as potentially underpaid or under-skilled relative to what the market would otherwise pay them.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Expat.com (Zambia forum) — A Portugal-based professional who moved to Zambia to work in agricultural private equity, after an international career at Coca-Cola, described the jump as a deliberate pivot toward development-sector work rather than a conventional corporate ladder — illustrating how thin the formal "climb the company" path actually is once you're outside Lusaka's small expat-heavy corporate layer.

Expat.com (Zambia forum) — A South African expat running a chiropractic clinic in Lusaka's Rhodespark area, almost a year into the move, framed the relocation around building an independent practice rather than joining an existing employer — a pattern that recurred across the thread, where newcomers more often described starting ventures (farming, trades, small business) than searching for a single long-term employer.

Blind (teamblind.com, job-hopping thread) — A hiring manager posting on frequent job changes said they weed for "culture fit" and "ability to ramp quickly" rather than tenure length, adding that they themselves expect good employees to leave within two years if the role isn't actively rewarded — a hiring philosophy increasingly assumed by name in Vietnam's own recruitment conversations about Gen Z retention.

Conclusion

Moving to Zambia for work means recalibrating what "career" even means — the real decision tree is formal-sector security versus entrepreneurial hedge, not whether to switch employers. Moving to Vietnam means accepting that staying still is the unusual move, and that your own resume will be read charitably for hopping, not punished for it. If a friend asked me which to bet on for a single job's stability: neither, honestly — bet on your own adaptability instead, because in one country the ladder barely exists, and in the other, everyone's already on a different one.