Software Engineering :: Career :: Job :: Search :: Training :: Cultivated Strategy #4: The Myth That's Costing You 50% Of Your Income
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Ok Wil, we're back with Strategy #4!
Today we're going to be talking about "job hopping." Specifically, we're going to touch on why all of the people who tell you it's a bad thing are completely wrong.
Traditionally, job hopping was considered to be the equivalent of professional suicide. The “experts” told us that we need to stay at a job for at least a year before we consider moving on…or else.
Personally, I had four jobs during the course of the two years it took me to go from graduation to landing my dream job. To be perfectly clear, I am not advocating for this as a long term solution. However, if done correctly, job hopping is one of the most efficient ways to accelerate your career and your salary in the short term.
When you work at several companies in a short period of time, you:
- Gain exposure to different business models and practices, allowing you to consolidate the most effective methods into your skill set
- Rapidly develop your network by building relationships with a diverse group of people from all sorts of backgrounds
- Build success stories in different environments that you can then leverage across a wide variety of situations down the road
- Accelerate your earnings
According to Forbes, employees who stay at companies for longer than 2 years, make up to 50% less over the course of 10 years:
Inevitably, someone will read this and say “nobody will want to hire someone like you” or “good luck, you’ll burn all of your bridges.”
This might put me in hot water, but the people who say things like this typically:
- Have taken the traditional path of “climbing the corporate ladder,” they have been in the professional world for 10+ years and are only beginning to reap the benefits
- Have never worked at a top company
- Have not had a consistent track record of high performance
Their points only become a concern if you spend your time providing very little value to the people and organizations you work for. I did whatever it took to ensure that I was a top performer at every company I worked for. This allowed me develop strong relationships, accrue top tier results to showcase on my resume, and ensure that my references were positive.
When you are applying to “dream companies” like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. they realize that they are the cream of the crop.
They don’t care if you’ve been hopping around. They are only concerned with hiring the best talent because they know that they have the resources to retain those people.
Tomorrow we're going to talk about the one simple thing that all successful people have in common and how you can unlock it for yourself.
Be well, Austin