Til Retirement Do Us Part: What Iran and Canada Each Decided to Do With a Job

🇮🇷 Iran · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Iran, the average worker stays in a job for roughly twelve years, a tenure long enough to see three finance ministers come and go; in Canada, barely one in two professionals can make it through a single calendar year without quietly updating a résumé. Neither fact means what it first appears to. The Iranian figure is less a monument to loyalty than a symptom of a labour market with nowhere obvious to jump to, while the Canadian one is less a symptom of restlessness than a rational response to a market that, until recently, rewarded restlessness handsomely. Put the two side by side and the real story isn't about devotion versus ambition. It's about what happens to both virtues once the exits start closing.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇷 Iran

🇨🇦 Canada

Staying put in Iran looks, on paper, like extraordinary commitment. Eghtesad Online, citing the Statistical Centre of Iran's own labour force survey, has put average job tenure at roughly twelve years, a figure that would make a Canadian HR department weep with joy. But according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace, only 12 percent of Iranian employees describe themselves as engaged at work in 2025, against a Middle East and North Africa average of 14 percent and a global average of 20 percent; 64 percent are simply not engaged, and a further 24 percent are actively disengaged. Just 20 percent of Iranians say it's currently a good time to find a new job where they live, compared with 52 percent globally. Twelve years of tenure, in other words, is not twelve years of enthusiasm. It is twelve years of nowhere better to go.

That absence of alternatives is itself the story, and it is emptying out from the top. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, roughly 2.2 million Iranians, about 3.3 percent of the population, left the country last year for work or other reasons, and 62 percent of them say they do not plan to return. The Iranian Migration Observatory estimates that half of the country's university students and recent graduates, more than 66,000 people, have decided to emigrate. Farhikhtegan newspaper reported that 6,500 doctors and medical specialists left in 2022 alone, and Iran's own nursing-association chief has told local media that 100 to 150 nurses emigrate every month. The people with the least trouble finding work elsewhere are, naturally, the ones a twelve-year-tenure statistic depends on most. Hofstede Insights scores Iran at 41 on individualism against Canada's 80, a wide gap that helps explain why staying with one employer there still carries social as well as economic weight, even as the most mobile workers quietly plan their own way around it.

Canada tells almost the opposite joke. A Robert Half survey of Canadian professionals found that 50 percent had started or were planning to look for a new job in the second half of 2024, up from 41 percent in the final quarter of 2023, driven above all by salary (cited by 60 percent) rather than title or flexibility. Gen Z workers led the charge at 69 percent. This is simply the latest chapter in a long-running national habit: Canadian labour economists have been predicting the death of the "job for life" since at least the 1990s, and one Conference Board of Canada economist famously told employers that if they wanted loyalty, they should get a cocker spaniel. But the habit has recently gone quiet. Statistics Canada reported that the job-changing rate fell to 0.4 percent in January 2025, down from 0.5 percent a year earlier and below the pre-pandemic 2017-2019 average of 0.7 percent, while the share of permanent employees planning to leave within twelve months dropped to 6.1 percent from 6.9 percent. Recent permanent residents still intend to leave at a much higher rate, 9.3 percent, than Canadian-born workers, at 5.8 percent, which is its own small lesson about who still has to hustle hardest.

The reckoning, then, is not loyalty against ambition but patience against appetite, and both are currently being rationed by the same force: a labour market with fewer open doors than either country's reputation suggests. Iran's twelve-year tenure was never really about devotion to an employer; it was about devotion to the exit visa, the remittance account, and the relative who already made it to Toronto or Vancouver. Canada's famous churn, meanwhile, was never really about restlessness for its own sake; it was about a market that, for two decades, simply paid better for people willing to ask. Cool that market down, as it has cooled since 2023, and Canadians start behaving, mobility-wise, a little more like the Iranians they'd never think to compare themselves to: staying, grudgingly, because the alternative has gotten harder to find, not because the relationship has gotten any warmer.

What should unsettle anyone reading both statistics is how little either one is actually measuring loyalty. Iran's number measures scarcity of options at home; Canada's measures the recent scarcity of options everywhere else. A worker who stays twelve years in Tehran and a worker who stays eighteen months in Toronto may, underneath the very different averages, be making exactly the same calculation: leave the moment something better and reachable appears, and not one day before.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

GPB News (NPR member station) — a 42-year-old Tehran engineer described the quiet panic of nights spent driving for a ride-share app after his employer collapsed when it lost its international client network; he had only just found a new sales-manager role when he described himself and his wife as "passengers on a train" who don't know if the bridge ahead is intact.

GPB News (NPR member station) — a 42-year-old Tehran materials engineer said his firm folded almost overnight once the Strait of Hormuz closed and shipping to clients stopped; he compared clearing out his desk that day to a scene from an American film, and said the inflation since has left his household running on his wife's income and dwindling savings.

York University International Experience Program profile — a former senior IT manager at one of Iran's largest retailers moved to Canada expecting a smooth transition, only to find that years of real seniority counted for nothing without "Canadian experience"; he eventually rebuilt his career from the ground up at a small real-estate-technology startup, and now advises other newcomers to look past banks and government toward companies willing to bet on unfamiliar résumés.

CBC Radio, Out in the Open — a man who was imprisoned in Iran for his political views after losing his teaching job later resettled in Canada and spent years driving a taxi despite his education, a trade he described as swapping social status for the simple ability to sleep without fearing a knock at the door; he counts it worthwhile now that his children have professional careers of their own.

Blind (teamblind.com) — in a thread asking whether to stay loyal to a good manager despite stronger offers elsewhere, the most upvoted advice was blunt: loyalty is one-way, since the company can end the relationship whenever it likes, so be loyal to your own skills and market value, not to an employer who will not return the favour.

Conclusion

If you're deciding between these two, the honest comparison isn't culture, it's leverage. Move to Iran for work and your tenure will likely look admirable on paper and feel, some mornings, like waiting in a line that may never move; the twelve-year average is a market telling you politely that it has nowhere else to send you, at least not inside its own borders. Move to Canada and you'll be handed a culture that actively expects you to leave every couple of years, right up until the market cools, at which point everyone, including the people who built their careers switching jobs, suddenly starts talking a great deal about "stability."

Neither country has solved the real question, which is how to reward people for staying without punishing them for it, or how to reward people for leaving without making everyone else feel like a fool for not doing the same. So here's what I'd actually tell a friend over a drink: don't move to Iran for the loyalty, and don't move to Canada for the mobility, because by the time you arrive, the market will likely have changed its mind about which one it's offering.