Job Hopping – Can it Hurt Your Career?

For years, it has been a norm for an employee to work for the same company or in a role for most of their working life. Getting the gold watch at your retirement was what many professionals once strived for. However, those days are long gone, and workers today are expected to have multiple roles and different career paths throughout their lives.

But how many is too many and how long should you stay in a job before you are looking for the next one?

There is no magical number of how long you need to spend in a role – this differs for each individual – however, if you are spending less than 18 months in all your roles, then this may make some prospective employers nervous.

For many people, it is about career progression. In a survey developed by Seek, they found that 29% of Australians expected to progress internally with their current employer. However, 45% felt that they needed to leave their current employer in order to progress their career. If you are someone who agrees with this 45%, then leaving may be your only option.

Job hopping can bring a wide range of benefits to you that you can then utilise to get to your desired role. Such benefits may include: access to a wide range of experiences, opportunities to obtain new skills and/or a potential increase in your monetary compensation.

However, this may also entail some negative consequences, such as posing a potential threat to your job security. Due to the short duration of your role, you may miss the long-term benefits of your work and your promotion may be slow as you have less time to prove your capacity within the team. Additionally, frequent job hopping may give colleagues the impression that you lack commitment and consistency, leading them to doubt your reliability in the business. This may place you in the top consideration list at times when the company is forced to make redundancies.

So where does this leave you?

Ideally, you need to have a good understanding of what you want from your career and make job moves that will benefit you and help get you where you want to go. You also need to think about whether you have made the most of your current role and if there is more for you to achieve. Are there new projects coming that you would love to be a part of that will give you additional experience? Is there an alternative team you think would be great to be a part of that you can switch across to?

It is also important to think long term. Where do you hope to be in 5, 10 years and what is the best path to get there? Whilst these longer terms goals can be harder to identify, making some notes about your ideal role, company or situation will give you an end point that you can then work back from. It will help you to create a career plan to discover which path to take and how to get where you want to go.

To help you on this journey, take a look at current roles that are being advertised and feel free to call our team to discuss career path options.