Seniority and criterion measures of job proficiency.

"On the basis of an analysis of 47 studies involving measures of the job proficiency of 2,462 workers employed in 39 different occupations, the average correlation between seniority and job proficiency is .17 with a standard error of correlation of .02. The type of measure of job success influences the relation between seniority and job success… [and]… the influence of seniority increases with the skill level of the occupations sampled… with skilled occupation the influence appears to be large relative to the magnitude of validity coefficients commonly obtained and should be taken into account and controlled whenever possible." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)