Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Job Hop or Go Stale
Are you due a job hop? If you stay you could run the risk of becoming stale.
How long have you been in your current job position? If it’s longer than three years, then you’re going against the trend, because the average life span of a job now is only three years.
If you love your job, you work in a great environment with super people and you have enough opportunities to develop and grow, then don’t worry too much about the current job trend. You obviously have an employer who understands the importance of engaging employees, someone who challenges you and gives you the autonomy to try your hand at new and different things.
A few reasons why people job hop are:
- Bad company culture
- No room to grow
- Not encouraged to develop
- No autonomy
- Not challenged enough
- Employer didn’t fulfil their promise
- Poor training
- Hierarchy
- No flexibility
If any of the above apply to you then you seriously need to consider a job hop, if you don’t, then you run the risk of becoming stale. Some people stay in a job they hate too long, the reason they give is “job security”. What they fail to realise is that the longer they stay in a job where they’re not developing, not being challenged, working alongside people who moan about their job but do nothing about it, they create “job insecurity”. Their “job security” is completely based on the monthly wage going into the bank.
Let’s take this scenario, you work for the same company for 10years, doing the same thing day in and day out, never learning anything new, on the same equipment “because it does the job” and you daren’t talk about doing anything different because you know they hate change. Then one day that company you work for can’t compete with its competitors anymore because they failed to adapt to change and you’re out of a job. Yikes, you feel scared, you realise you’ve been institutionalised, you realise that your skills are completely outdated, you never kept up, you’ve gone stale!
This happens a lot, in today's world, with the speed of how technology is changing everything you have to keep up or you become a dinosaur very quickly.
If you intend to stay at a company for a while, you must be given the opportunities to develop, to job hop within the organisation to learn new skills and become an agile employee. Your employer must challenge you and give you the freedom to fail, to learn from those failures and come up with your solutions. Training must be ongoing and tech updates must be ongoing, that includes new equipment, new software, new platforms, you cannot afford to fall behind and neither can the company you work for.
After a while, if you realise you’re going to go stale where you are then you should plan to Job hop, if you leave it too long, it could have devastating results for your career.
Job hopping can be very beneficial when done in a strategic way, read about what myself, Koulla Raouna and Agnes Butterworth say about strategic job hopping on Total Jobs
JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.
Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk
- Career