In a recent employee survey by Mercer it was found that one in two employee is seriously considering leaving their jobs for better opportunities in terms of career and base pay. Interestingly around 66% of employees under age 24 are seriously considering leaving. It leads to an interesting question that I have been pondering over and researching informally:
Is changing jobs the best way to get a raise?
After say more than 15 years work experience, do you think someone who has hopped jobs more regularly will be paid more than someone who has spent longer in each job? While I haven’t done any serious research, however based on the senior level profiles I come across, I haven’t yet found substantial evidence of job hoping really making a significant impact on the ability to get more pay in the long run. I haven’t particularly found people with more job changes at higher salary levels than the ones who might have stayed in organizations longer.
It would be interesting to have a survey for people with say more than 15 years of work experience. Would love to hear your observations on this. Do take the time to respond below.
See responses here.
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Let's compare two different scenarios.
Employee A stays at the same company for 15 years and gets a 3% raise each year.
Employee B changes jobs 5 times in 15 years (staying 2-3 years at each job) and gets 8-10% more with each move.
Even if Employee B gets no raises while at each stop, job hopping ends up pushing the salary higher.
I seem to recall someone doing research on this in the US, but I can't find it right now. I'll keep looking though.
In reality the roles will change over a period of time. If the individual is not performing in the role over a period of time, he/she will anyway be out of the job. Also the companies will want to retain the employees by ensuring that they give market rate salary. So while with each job change individuals do get a jump, however even staying in the same company for longer (average say 6-7 years) would result in similar salary after 15+ years. It would make an interesting research study though.
At least in the US, I've heard of very few times when a company really plays "catch up" with salary. Companies do the research and find out how far off they are, but they hardly ever actually do a big raise to compensate unless the employee is promoted. They talk about it, they just never put their money where their mouth is.
People who are primarily or significantly motivated by stability won't actually jump ship even when not paid market rates, and corporations know that. They count on people being too afraid to take the risk of leaving.
In India, there's usually a cap on how much salary a person gets in a given role. So even is one jumps jobs, they are still within that same salary band. I guess jumping jobs allows one to reach the high end of the salary band faster but doesn't necessarily help in going beyond that. Yes in the short term it would seem jumping jobs helps get a raise but I am wondering if it has any significant impact in the long term.