The median number of years that employees have worked for their current employer is currently 4. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you were to change jobs every three to five years, you would be right within the average, and the job switches may reward you with higher compensation and a broader base of skills than you'd acquire by working for only one or two companies during your entire career.
If you look at one year as a guideline for staying at a job, this can work for one job or even two in your total career history. Employers realize that, during difficult economic times, employees may be forced to leave a job within their first year through no fault of their own due to situations like layoffs.
However, if you have established a pattern of working at several jobs for only a year, you are creating a job-hopping work history and your resume isn't going to impress any hiring manager. If you're concerned about being considered a job hopper, here are some resume tips that may help.
Layoffs can't be avoided, but if you are moving on by choice, it's a good idea to consider what, if any, impact the move will have on your future prospects. Sometimes work becomes so toxic that staying may not be an option. Or, you could have been recruited for your dream job. In those cases, you don't need to think too hard about what to do. In other situations, though, it can be simply a question of being bored or not challenged, and that's when it's time to think twice about leaving.
Staying too long at a job can also hinder your employment prospects, and a lengthy tenure with one company can give the impression that you aren't interested in growing your career. It can also lead employers to think that you may not have the flexibility or open-mindedness for success in a new role.
So, when is the best time to change jobs? It's a question of balance, with enough years put in to learn and grow, but not so many years that your skill set becomes stagnant or entrenched in one company's way of doing things. If you have several short-term jobs in your employment history , ask yourself some questions before you decide to resign and start yet another job search:.
There isn't such a thing as a perfect resume because there are so many reasons for leaving a job and for staying at a job. For example, perhaps you learned what types of work culture are best for you or what industries you are most interested in having worked in one you were not.
During the interview, turn the focus onto your career goals and what you can bring to the workplace based on your past experience. Let the hiring manager know what you see in their company that convinced you to apply for the role.
There are definite benefits to developing tenure at a job, but know that switching roles can be a great thing. It provides you with the opportunity to take on new responsibilities and learn more.
Employers do appreciate loyalty, but they also understand that some job change is necessary to grow in your career. Although staying in a job for a long time sends the message you care about your work, it can also give the impression that you have become complacent.
If you have a longer tenure to discuss on your resume, make sure you discuss any kind of career development or growth that occurred while there. If you have worked for a company for a certain amount of time, and are considering finding an opportunity elsewhere, it's wise to ask yourself several questions to determine if this is the right move for you.
Here are some questions to get you started:. The answer to this question will depend on your current employer and the new job prospect you have.
Think about if your current company is giving you the opportunities you want and if they have the kind of training program you know you'll benefit from. Evaluate what you're truly looking for in a career and base your next decisions upon this. It may take a little while to come to a conclusion because switching jobs should take a lot of consideration. Look over your resume from an employer's perspective to see how a hiring manager may interpret your job history, but also to be honest with yourself about the reasoning for any job changes in the past.
Instead of immediately changing jobs, think about your current role and ask yourself if you can improve it.
For example, maybe you love your job and work with great people, but you want to take on a leadership role. Make sure you have discussed your goals with your manager during your review and asked what else you can do or what projects you can take on to establish yourself as a leader in the workplace.
Some industries, such as information technology, experience more career change than others. Before leaving your current role, take the time to research what is standard in your field. If your industry is one that's constantly changing, you may notice that more people switch employers so they can make sure they are staying up-to-date with emerging trends and the skills necessary for the job.
During the interview process for any new role, your hiring manager will likely ask why you're looking to make a job change. The reason for this is they want to make sure you're leaving your current role for the right reasons and that they can provide something a little different to you, ensuring a mutually beneficial working relationship for the future.
Think about if you're able to adequately explain your desire for a new role. Think about your reasons for leaving, and determine if they are valid for the long term.
Perhaps your manager selected a coworker of yours for a promotion instead of you and now you want to accept a role with a new employer because of it. Instead, think about all the factors that make up a place to work, such as the benefits package, culture, training opportunities and more to determine if this is the right place for you to remain. In the promotion example, consider that there may be an important reason you didn't get a promotion to a leadership role.
The longer he remains in the locale, the more likely he is to become a turn-on-plus. But suppose a time comes when his motivation is low. Will he leave? If benefit programs have created a financial dependency, if he has stock options that are not exercisable for two or three years, if he has children who are in good schools, if he has just purchased his dream house—then he probably will not become a turnover statistic.
Nonetheless, he may become psychologically absent—a turn-off. The consequences may show up in alcoholism, chronic physical or psychological illness, divorce, low productivity and motivation, and perhaps unionization. Suppose, instead, that this same engineer has continued to find job satisfaction.
He may still stay for some environmental reasons, and the combination of reasons will probably be right—both he and the company find his employment fulfilling.
In neither case has he become a turnover casualty, but there is a dramatic difference between the two situations in terms of morale and productivity. One purpose of our research is to understand better the balance between job satisfaction and environmental reasons as it affects employee retention and to gain insight into ways to influence that balance.
We designed our research to answer questions like these:. Our respondents gave many reasons for staying. We have broken these down into reasons relating to the environment outside the company—the external environment—and reasons relating to the work environment itself, within the company—the internal environment. Further, we have broken down the reasons relating to the internal environment into a motivational factors and b maintenance factors.
Exhibit II represents these two breakdowns. Each row of symbols in the exhibit is divided into three parts:. Exhibit II. To prepare Exhibit II, we took the ten reasons for staying cited most frequently by the members of a specific employee group and assigned them to the three categories just listed.
For example, employees with college degrees most frequently cited six relating to on-the-job motivation, three relating to job maintenance, and one relating to the environment external to the company.
The exhibit shows that low-skill manufacturing employees stay primarily for maintenance or environmental reasons, many relating to the nonwork environment.
These employees will not remain on the payroll because of job satisfaction. To them, factors outside the company are more important. The reasons managers and professionals gave for staying were significantly different. As Exhibit II shows, managerial and professional employees stay primarily for reasons related to their work and the work environment; six of the top ten reasons they cited for staying were related to job satisfaction, three to the company environment, and only one to the outside environment.
These data suggest that managers and professionals are more likely to be turn-ons, while low-skill manufacturing people are very likely to be turn-offs. The moderately skilled manufacturing employees and the clerical people who are not directly involved in the production process more closely resemble the managers and professionals in their reasons for staying than they do low-skill manufacturing people. However, most organizations tend to treat all manufacturing employees alike in terms of benefits, working conditions, supervision, and pay.
This study suggests that many skilled hourly employees would be less dissatisfied and more productive if they were treated more nearly as managers are, rather than as low-skill blue-collar workers are. In the interest of assessing equal opportunity, we compared whites with nonwhites among hourly employees.
Nonwhite minorities cited maintenance and environmental reasons for staying more frequently, without mentioning a single motivation factor among their top ten reasons. People with less than five years of company service were compared with those with five or more. Employees with shorter service stay for internal reasons, their inertia being strengthened by a combination of job satisfaction and the job setting. However, after five years of service, environmental reasons begin to appear, while internal reasons tend to slip in relative significance.
In other words, as in the case of the young engineer, these employees join a company because they want to. However, as they build family and economic responsibilities, these may displace internal reasons for staying. A similar relationship was found in educational levels. Given the traditional managerial belief that educational level represents a meaningful distinction among employees, we examined the influence of maintenance and external environment on people at various skill levels.
Exhibit III shows the percentage of employees, by skill category, who selected various environmental reasons for staying with their companies. These figures highlight the varied degrees of significance people with different skill levels place on environmental factors:. Exhibit III. Hence there seem to be real differences in the importance the three groups attach to environmental factors. Additionally, we might note that managers are more willing to look for new jobs, even though this may be difficult, whereas the low-skill workers tend to be unwilling to do this.
Exhibit III also shows the significance of environmental factors for employees with different degrees of job satisfaction. Such reasons for staying are self-defeating and hardly could be considered right. These turn-offs have not yet affected turnover statistics, but still they may be having just as severe, or even a more severe, effect on the company. These employees see themselves as so locked in by the environment that they have little alternative but to stay; and, therefore, the possibility of reduced productivity or behavior antagonistic to the organization is great.
Historically this locked-in, turned-off condition has been considered characteristic of manufacturing or unskilled-labor categories, primarily. However, recent reports of increased union interest at the managerial level suggest that it is occurring at higher levels of the organization as well.
One study shows that alienation is not limited to the hourly ranks, but may occur at any level of an organization. We gained some insight into why an employee stays with a company when he is dissatisfied with his job, supervisor, benefits, pay, and so on.
These employees are excellent examples of personnel who have not affected the turnover statistics but who may have left the company, psychologically, long ago. This finding illustrates the fact that the reasons people stay are not necessarily the opposite of the reasons why people leave. One often hears negative statements about supervisors and jobs in exit interviews; yet, of the employees we studied, many who made such statements are still with the companies about which they complain.
These are the turn-offs. Moreover, it suggests that these employees do not have as much job mobility as many companies assume. The reinforcement that environmental factors give to the inertia of these alienated employees must be quite powerful, and it will probably take a strong force to break their inertia—in extreme cases, discharge.
It might be concluded at this point that level in the organization, race, tenure, education, and degree of job satisfaction determine why people stay.
However, we found a factor more potent than any of these—namely, the work ethic of the people involved in the study. Human beings exist at different levels of psychological development, and these levels are expressed in the values they hold respecting their work. This level of psychological development is restricted primarily to infants, people with serious brain deterioration, and certain psychopathic conditions.
For practical purposes, employees are not ordinarily found at Level 1. These employees are best suited to jobs that offer easy work, friendly people, fair play, and, above all, a good boss. An employee at this level believes that he may not have the best job in the world, but he does as well as others with jobs like his.
He likes a boss who tells him exactly what to do and how to do it, and who encourages him by doing it with him. The two major requirements of a job for this employee are that it pay well and keep people off his back. He does not care for any kind of work that ties him down, but he will do it if he must in order to get some money.
Because of the raw, rugged value system of this employee, he needs a boss who is tough, but allows him to be tough too. This employee likes a job which is secure, where the rules are followed, and no favoritism is shown.
He feels that he has worked hard for what he has and thinks he deserves some good breaks. Others, he believes, should realize that it is their duty to work. The ideal job for this employee is one which is full of variety, allows some free wheeling and dealing, and offers pay and bonus on the basis of results.
He feels he is responsible for his own success and is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. A good boss for this employee understands the politics of getting the job done, knows how to bargain, and is firm but fair. A job which allows for the development of friendly relationships with supervisors and others in the work group appeals to this employee.
Working with people toward a common goal is more important than getting caught up in a materialistic rat race.
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