In 2024, journalist Megha Chaturvedi, drawing on LinkedIn data and labour-market trends in India, reported that 88% of professionals in the country were considering a job change. The following year, 82% said they were actively looking. By 2026, that figure had dropped to 72%.
Read as a trend, it looks like cooling intent. Read as context, it suggests something else: by the time the percentages started falling, mobility-first thinking had already become the default logic of professional ambition, so fewer people felt the need to announce it.
The incentive structures behind that shift are real and largely rational. They’re organised around portable skills, visible credentials, external market signals – and they optimise for exactly those things. The professional capital that doesn’t travel, that accumulates in one place over years and becomes inseparable from the institution where it was built, doesn’t register in these systems. Not because it’s rare. Because there’s no obvious column for it on a CV.
The Logic of Leaving and Its Limitations
The shift behind those numbers is structural, not generational. Professional identity has been rewired around what people can do anywhere rather than what they have built somewhere specific. CVs, LinkedIn profiles and performance frameworks all favour portable competencies: project management, domain expertise, technical skills, leadership behaviours. Institutions are treated, at least implicitly, as interchangeable backdrops. Under this incentive system, the rational move for a capable mid-career professional is usually to look outward for the next role rather than inward for deeper responsibility in the current one.
That system delivers real, measurable benefits. Surveys of Indian employees commonly report salary jumps in the range of 15–40% when switching employers. Switching can also deliver skills exposure in months that an internal restructure might not deliver in years. For professionals facing flat pay, narrow roles or a poorly managed team, movement is a rational hedge – and for many, a straightforwardly better deal.
Yet the systems that reward portability are indifferent to institutional depth. Technical competence travels; operational fluency inside a specific organisation does not. Over time, staying put can generate assets a mobile career rarely accumulates: the infrastructure of an embedded programme, dense mutual referral relationships that route complex work reliably, and the informal authority to adjust systems rather than just use them. These forms of capital only emerge when someone has stayed long enough for colleagues, data and workflows to cohere around their presence – and they remain largely invisible until they are absent.
Depth in Surgical Practice
Continuity in complex clinical work is not just a cultural preference. An observational study of neurosurgical procedures found that higher operating-room nursing staff turnover during cases was independently associated with increased surgical-site infection risk. The structural implication is direct: each extra handover or unfamiliar team member adds process noise that, in high-stakes environments, can surface as complications. Stable teams are not a comfort feature. They function as a safety mechanism.
That study describes what instability costs. Dr Timothy Steel’s practice at St Vincent’s Private Hospital shows what the continuous version looks like when it has been running for decades. Steel is a neurosurgeon and minimally invasive spine surgeon whose consultant appointment at the hospital dates to 1998. He operates within the same environment regularly, with theatre staff, anaesthetics and rehabilitation services that have worked around his cases and methods across that time.
That continuity has been channelled into a spine programme built around dedicated navigation-assisted equipment and coordinated perioperative care. Within this setup, Steel directs case selection, planning and intraoperative execution. Career totals of over 8,000 minimally invasive spine procedures and more than 2,000 complex fusions and disc replacements reflect the volume a stable, embedded programme can sustain.
More recently, St Vincent’s Private adopted an integrated digital surgery platform, becoming the first hospital in Australasia to offer it. The system combines neuromonitoring, imaging, navigation, planning and rod bending in a single workflow. A platform designed to reduce variability is only as consistent as the team trained around it – the technology amplifies continuity rather than substituting for it. That combination of surgeon, team and system, embedded inside one hospital, produces something genuinely difficult to reconstitute elsewhere. Whether the institutions making staffing decisions can see that value clearly enough before it walks out the door is a harder question.
Depth in Academic-Clinical Research
Longitudinal registries are, at their core, safety infrastructure. The Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry maintains ongoing surveillance of implants and runs a formal process for flagging prostheses with higher-than-anticipated revision rates. Published descriptions note it identified elevated revision risk in the DePuy ASR hip implants – a finding that only became visible through cumulative, consistent follow-up. The National Joint Registry’s 20th Annual Report for England, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Guernsey makes the same point from the other direction. Professor Mike Reed, Chair of the Editorial Committee, and Mr Tim Wilton, Medical Director, caution against reading too much into early outcome signals when follow-up is short and numbers are small: “Clearly this is still relatively short follow-up, with the uncertainty of small numbers and ongoing monitoring is essential.”
That dependence on sustained monitoring maps directly onto careers anchored in a single academic-clinical network. Professor Peter Choong, an orthopaedic and oncologic surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, has been embedded in the University of Melbourne–St Vincent’s network since the mid-1990s and heads the Department of Surgery at St Vincent’s. He leads an active joint replacement programme that powers the hospital’s SMART arthroplasty outcomes registry, described in a BMJ Open cohort profile as a structured system with systematic follow-up and patient-reported outcome measures. Organisational profiles credit him with conceiving and establishing SMART. That phrase is doing quiet institutional work: most registries are credited to systems or committees, and the individual continuity behind them tends to disappear into organisational language.
The registry doesn’t operate independently of the relationships that sustain it. Decades within the same institutional network generate the organisational memory and trusted referral channels that make a programme like SMART function over the long term – colleagues who route complex cases through established pathways, clinical staff familiar with data-collection requirements, and the informal authority to maintain the programme’s direction across changes in hospital administration and research priorities. That kind of relational infrastructure isn’t something a new appointment replicates quickly.
The research output that has grown from this platform – spanning functional recovery, health economics and patient satisfaction after joint replacement – is the accumulated product of institutional continuity, not expertise in isolation. It required sustained access to the same patient population, the same data infrastructure, and the same referral relationships across decades. No shorter tenure produces it by definition. And the compounding logic runs in both directions: if this kind of longitudinal capacity depends entirely on the same relationship being maintained, what does its disruption actually cost?
The Costs of Staying and Institutional Consequences
Long tenure is not automatically virtuous. It can blur the line between understanding how a system works and deciding it should keep working that way. Familiarity substitutes for scrutiny. Networks built over time can narrow rather than expand the range of challenges a practitioner takes on. And the authority to shape systems from within can harden into a preference for protecting them unchanged. What distinguishes productive long-term insiders from institutional furniture is practice, not personality – the habit of subjecting institutionally rooted work to external standards, ideas and collaborators.
When practitioners who carry that depth do leave – or are structurally filtered out – the loss rarely shows up in hiring metrics. Shilpa Sinha Harsh, Executive Vice President for global communications, CSR, DEI and ESG at HGS, synthesises World Economic Forum data and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research to show that mid-career attrition among women widens leadership gaps and weakens succession pipelines. The mechanism she identifies – institutional knowledge exiting at critical career stages – does not stop at gender. It operates wherever sustained expertise leaves prematurely, and the pipeline consequences are the same.
Retaining institutional depth requires more than avoiding exits. Organisations need roles that expand over time, deliberate exposure to outside ideas, and recognition in pay and progression for the non-portable value long-tenured staff hold. Structured return pathways matter too – they preserve accumulated expertise that would otherwise leave the institutional record entirely. These are not welfare provisions. They are the conditions under which institutional depth stays productive rather than calcifies into resistance. The structural gap is that mobility markets have clear mechanisms to price portable credentials, salary uplift and skill breadth – but no equivalent mechanism to price longitudinal programme infrastructure, registry continuity or referral-network depth. Those assets remain invisible to the very decision-making processes that determine whether they are retained.
What Presence Compounds
The LinkedIn data from India points consistently toward a mobile workforce, and the professionals acting on those intentions are responding rationally to a market that rewards them for it. But mobility-first logic is structurally incapable of producing certain forms of professional value – a spine programme that has accumulated more than two decades of institutional infrastructure, or a joint-replacement registry whose longitudinal value rises with every additional year of follow-up. Those outcomes are not the product of portable competence applied in a new setting. They are the product of continuity.
Professional ambition has always had two expressions: breadth acquired by moving through many contexts, and depth built by staying in one. Research on cardiac-surgery performance and organisational knowledge loss suggests why depth matters in ways that resist replication: performance and knowledge can be context-dependent, and once dispersed by turnover, are slow and difficult to rebuild – especially when what is lost was largely tacit. A registry cannot be reconstituted by a new appointment; a surgical programme cannot be replicated by transferring a CV. The value took decades to produce, which is precisely why no one notices it’s gone until it’s already hard to rebuild, particularly where the lost knowledge was never codified.
