Paul Turner has an unusual LinkedIn profile.
It lists him as "Lead - Product Development Engineer" with AT&T. Look a little closer and you see how long he's been with the telecom giant: 50 years and two months.
Turner, who goes by Kip, has far outlasted most of us in how long he's stayed with the same company. Government figures from 2022 show that the median time US workers have been with their current employer is 4.1 years. The secret to his longevity, Turner told Insider, is to stay interested in what you're doing — and to maintain a healthy reserve of patience.
"I have encouraged and counseled a lot of younger employees over my years and I've advocated patience," he said.
That's not always easy for many of us. Job hopping has slowed from its peak in recent years, though some Gen Zers say they're not afraid to quit, even without a backup. Nevertheless, the rate of young adult workers leaving their jobs has remained relatively stable over the decades.
Stability is something Turner can relate to.
"I enjoy what I do. And that's been one of the major tenets is learning and enjoying my role. If I didn't enjoy it, I would talk to my supervisor and say I needed to find something else. And I think people may be afraid to do that — that they think you're unhappy. And then I've had supervisors misunderstand that."
Often, younger people tend to go into an organization and look to climb quickly, Turner noted. "If that's your aspiration, that's great. But you still have to have patience. It's not going to happen overnight."
And changing jobs isn't always a cure-all, he advised. "I would try to explain, believe me, whatever you think is driving you away here, it'll be the same over there. And sure enough, a lot of them, a few years later, came back," Turner said.
Vet school was going to take too long
Turner, 68, essentially grew up in the telephone company. As a kid, he would roam the Southwestern Bell Telephone office in Conway, Arkansas, where his parents worked. He would poke at the equipment and ask questions about what everything did.
After a year in college made Turner realize it was going to "take too long" to become a veterinarian, he went into the family business. In August 1973, Turner got a job installing rotary telephones — look 'em up, kiddos — in Faulkner County, Arkansas. In rural areas, he also set up party lines, where multiple households shared a landline and had to wait until others were done chatting before placing a call.
To keep up with technology, Turner grabbed chances to learn formally through company training and in the field.
"I always found that I learned more by actually repairing things, working on things, bringing up new systems. And, honestly, that's where I got most of my education," Turner said.
A missile silo, a presidential campaign, and a tornado
Turner's career has included a night spent deep below ground in a missile silo trying to repair a phone line. He also, in the span of only months in the early 1990s, helped convert copper video cable to fiber optic lines so that the broadcast TV networks covering Bill Clinton's presidential campaign from Little Rock, Arkansas, had sufficient bandwidth.
In 1997, a tornado raked across the small town of Hickory Ridge, Arkansas. Turner ran part of the company's response, which included bringing in a "cell on wheels" — known as a COW — to restore wireless service. The tornado hit the company's local facility, knocking out most of the walls and shearing off much of the roof. It took a couple days to get wireless and landlines working again. That was fast for back then though Turner gets excited by how much quicker recovery can happen now — and, more broadly, how much faster technology moves today.
"What we're able to deliver to a handheld device is hundreds of times better and faster than what I dealt with when I worked on teletype systems back in the '80s," he said. "It's kept me interested."
He hasn't always followed his own advice
He's worked to remain engaged in what he does, Turner said because just being somewhere for a long time doesn't mean you'll have all the answers.
"I'm amazed sometimes that people think I know something just because I've been here 50 years," he said. And yet, experience has given him the ability to sometimes tell early on whether a plan will work. "I've tried to advise either coworkers or supervisors or leadership that, you know, you probably shouldn't do that because it didn't work the first time."
Those times are when Turner tries to show the composure he advises for some of his younger colleagues.
He counsels young workers to look at all the opportunities before them. For example, he's traveled around the country to complete technical training, which has helped him keep pace with the technology.
Turner's advice: "Just be patient. Be as content as you can be in your role. Be kind. And I haven't always followed my own advice, but it seems to have paid off somewhat."