The companies employees don't want to leave in 2023

The metric they're using (average tenure) is not useful for comparing employee retention across companies. E.g. a company that's growing will automatically have a lower average tenure than one that's not growing.

Now, it's understandable why they're using an inappropriate metric. It's the only thing they can even remotely reliably derive from their data set of scraped Linkedin profiles. But when your data is bad, the right thing to do is to just not do the study. Not to write a content marketinb blog post that's so blatantly incorrect that it has to be intentionally dishonest.

This is certainly the case for a company like Lockheed Martin. I used to live in an insular area where defense contracting was by far the dominant area of employment; although you could hop from one contractor to another you ended up having a very finite career progression because each of these companies were all competing for the same contracts which all had the same rules regarding how much they can pay employees. Staying at one such company for a decade isn't particularly uncommon because all of the others offer practically the same benefits and pay. Although the government periodically updates these rules they haven't kept pace with the market for some time now. Such downward pressure on wages combined with:

- a conservative technical vision that keeps worker skill sets 5-10 years behind industry

- long production timelines owing to slow, broken security and procurement processes (which are merely replicated in a new form every time somebody tries to introduce a streamlined alternative)

- promotions based on seniority and credentials instead of technical acumen and impact (since this is how the government attempts to objectively measure employee value)

- lack of technical rigor in interview processes (because contractors are incentivized to hire anybody remotely capable due to cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts, i.e. the "bodies in seats" mentality)

...results in employee stagnation and the phenomenon that you see in the article. I don't imagine that it's terribly different for large, entrenched interests like oil and freight companies. These are, after all, mature organizations with workforces many orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number with a dizzying number of orthogonal incentive structures spread across layers upon layers of middle management. Avoiding these types of issues at scale is obviously difficult - it's just a fact of life.

I don't think even that is true.

They could do a better metric like "Among the employees that were employed by company X ten years ago, what percentage are still employed there?"

This also solves the "average tenure at a growing company" problem.