Job Hugging – It’s Like Tree Hugging at Work

‍Why the biggest career trend of 2026 is being written about from the wrong side of the desk

In this article you will learn:

•          What job hugging is, and what the Australian numbers actually show

•          Why almost every article about it is addressed to your employer, not to you

•          What staying too long quietly costs your confidence and your options

•          How to tell the difference between staying as a strategy and staying out of fear

•          What to do this week, whichever one you are in

Introduction: You Meant to Leave Four Years Ago

You know the job has run its course.

You knew it the day you finished something big and felt nothing at all. You have thought about leaving roughly eleven thousand times, usually somewhere between the car park and your desk. And every time, you have talked yourself out of it.

The market looks grim. You are 52. At least here you know where the bodies are buried.

There is a name for this now. It is called job hugging, and it is the biggest workplace story in Australia this year.

What the Numbers Actually Say

LinkedIn research found just over half of Australians plan to look for a new job this year, down from 59% in 2025. Nearly seven in ten say finding a job has got harder. Four in five say they do not feel ready to search at all, and 36% say they are unprepared for how AI has changed recruitment.

Meanwhile, unemployment sat at 4.4% in May 2026 and workforce participation is near record highs.

Read those two paragraphs together and something odd falls out.

The market is not bad. It just feels bad. And a great many Australians are making decisions about the rest of their working lives based on a feeling rather than a fact.

The Part That Grinds My Gears

I have read a lot of coverage of job hugging lately. Recruitment firms, HR publications, workforce strategists. Most of it is good work. Almost all of it is written from the employer’s side of the desk.

The framing goes like this. Job hugging makes the labour market look calm when it is not. Employers should not mistake market stillness for health. There is a wave of resignations building behind the dam. Tidy up how your organisation presents itself and plan for the reset.

All true. All useful. And not one word of it is addressed to the midlife or mid-career woman doing the hugging.

Nobody is asking what it costs her. Nobody is asking what happens to a woman who spends three years frozen in a role she outgrew because the noise told her it was dangerous out there.

She is not an outlier. She is one of the more than half of Australian workers currently sitting still, and nearly every workplace is full of her.

What Staying Too Long Actually Costs

This is where I have to be straight with you, because the cost is real and it compounds quietly.

•          Your skills stop being current. Not dramatically. Gradually, the way a house gets dusty.

•          You lose your sense of where you stand. You have no idea what you are worth now, or how your experience is being valued by anyone other than your current employer - and that is the only place that information exists.

•          Your network narrows to the people you already work with, which is the least useful network you can have when you finally need one.

•          Your referees age. The person who could speak to your best work retires, or moves, or stops remembering the detail.

•          And your confidence erodes. Imposter syndrome does its best work in exactly these conditions - long stretches with no external evidence that you are any good.

That last one is the killer, and it is the one nobody counts. The longer you go without growing, the wider the gap feels between where you are and where you would need to be to go anywhere else. Not because you have become less capable, but because you have stopped collecting any evidence that you still are.

If you have been in the resilience trap - the one where coping quietly becomes self-erasure - this is what it looks like when it lands in your career rather than your kitchen.

Sometimes Staying Is the Right Call

Now let me argue the other side, because I am not here to talk anyone into a resignation.

Sometimes staying put is the smartest thing you can do. If your health is not where you need it to be, if your kids are in Year 12, if you have just bought a house, if your capacity is genuinely at its limit - then a stable job you have outgrown is not a failure. It is scaffolding. Hold it.

This is where understanding your season of life matters more than anything on your CV. Your needs and your capacity should drive this decision, not your capability. Capable women take on far too much precisely because they can, and then wonder why they are on the floor.

Staying can be a strategy. Staying can also be fear wearing a strategy’s clothes. From the outside they look identical.

The difference is not what you do. It is whether you chose it, and whether it has an end date.

Strategy sounds like: I am staying until the house settles, and while I am here I am keeping my skills current and my network warm.

Fear sounds like: not right now. And then not right now again, for three years. Dates don’t need to be fixed but there has to be an end in mind.

So does burnout. When you have been operating well beyond your capacity for a long stretch, ‘not right now’ is often all you have left - and from the outside it is almost impossible to tell apart from fear. It is worth knowing which one you are in, because they need completely different things. One needs a plan. The other needs rest before any plan will hold.

Whatever you decide, know that not making a decision to avoid making a decision - is in fact a decision.

Read that last line again.

What to Do About It, Whichever Answer You Got

The response is nearly the same either way, because the real problem is being unprepared rather than being unhappy.

•          Get your CV current, even if you are going nowhere.

•          Engage with your networks properly. Your local business chamber, your professional association, industry events, LinkedIn. Not to job hunt - to stay connected to a world that exists outside your building.

•          Find out what your role actually pays now, rather than what it paid when you last looked.

•          Learn how AI screening works. More than a third of Australians say they are not ready for it, and that number is almost certainly higher for women who last job-searched before it existed.

•          Upskill in a way that genuinely futureproofs you - not a random short course, but something that builds on what you already have and moves you toward work that is harder to automate.

•          Ask your referees now, while they still remember the detail.

Do those things and you have not committed to leaving. You have simply stopped being trapped - or worse, blindsided by a redundancy you were never prepared for.

A job you are choosing to stay in is a completely different job to one you feel stuck in - and not a single external thing has to change for that to become true.

How Career Counselling Supports This Shift

This is exactly the work career counselling is for. Not to push you out the door, but to help you work out which door you are actually standing at.

•          Naming what you have outgrown without immediately having to fix it

•          Getting honest about capacity, season of life, and what you can genuinely carry right now

•          Understanding where your experience sits in the current market

•          Building a plan that fits the woman you are now, rather than the one who took the job

If some of this is landing alongside other things that arrive in midlife, there is more here on what else tends to show up at the same time.

The Invitation

You do not have to leap. You just have to stop telling yourself there are no doors you could walk through, should the need or the desire arise. There are. But only if you are looking, and only if you have been cultivating them.

So before you do anything at all, make a coffee and sit with these four questions. Answer them honestly. Not aspirationally. Honestly.

•          What specifically am I waiting for, and how will I know when it has happened? If you cannot name it, you are not waiting. You are stuck.

•          If this job disappeared tomorrow, what would I do on Monday? If the answer is panic, that risk exists whether you move or not.

•          What have I learned in the last twelve months that someone would pay for

•          Am I staying because this job gives me something, or because leaving frightens me? The first is a decision. The second is a default.

Then pick one thing - just one - from the list further up, and give it a go this week.

And if you would like some company while you work out which door you are standing at, a Soul Strategy Call is a good place to start.

Sources

LinkedIn job hugging research, HRD Australia, January 2026

Australian labour market conditions, May 2026, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations

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