Funny, weren't we just kind of talking about this earlier today? And here comes CGMA Magazine with an article fresh off the presses about job-hopping (or, as I like to think of it, professional sluttiness) and why you don't want to be seen as a chronic job-hopper:
Leaving one company to work for another is part of life, but job-hopping can be bad for your career. And from an organisational standpoint, hiring the job-hopper could be bad for business.
A new survey of HR managers by global staffing company Robert Half defines job-hopping and offers advice for employees considering a change of work scenery.
More than 300 managers at US companies were asked, “Over a ten-year span, how many job changes, in your opinion, would it take for a professional to be viewed as a job-hopper?”
The average response: changing companies five times. Experts on recruiting in the UK agree that switching organisations every two years or less likely constitutes job-hopping.
When I was hiring, I considered a job span of under a year or significant gaps in employment to be more concerning than several different jobs over a longer period, especially if the series of jobs followed a logical evolution from crappy to less-than-crappy to wow, OK, you really found a good one there huh kid? Job-hopping itself isn't the issue, as one should feel no obligation to stick with an employer for any reason (yes, I said that). It isn't indentured servitude, it's corporate America. You are just as free to leave as they are to make you.
Why is this all on the job-hopper and not the companies they hopped from? You know, the ones with the shiny brochures and the hot, persistent recruiters and the company-sanctioned social media Kool-Aid distribution?
The piece continues with a bit of good news:
In finance, career advancement could bring on the need to change jobs more often than every two years, experts said. Shahid Nawaz of global recruiting firm Hays said that showing career progression can help cancel out the negative perception of rapid-fire job changes.
“For the core finance roles, if you’re moving every two years to gain greater exposure or some new skill set, people are accepting of that,” said Nawaz, business director for Hays’s accountancy and finance practice.
So hop away if you must, don't let these people scare you into sticking around with a dead end company just because OMG YOU MIGHT NEVER GET HIRED ANYWHERE ELSE AGAIN, YOU SLUT!
That said, maybe you should take a good hard look at yourself if you are constantly miserable in every job you take; sort of like my nearly 40 year old unmarried friend who seems to date only losers she met online. After about the 10th loser, you've got to wonder if it's not the losers but her ability to attract them that should be addressed. She also tends to hate every job she's in so, you know, there's something to this idea.