How long should you stay in your job?

 

Everyone knows that staying in one job too long can equal career suicide in today’s workplace but how long is too long? How do you know when it’s time to move on and what will look good on your resume?

Opinions from recruiters vary but most agree anything less than two years is too short, as few measurable changes are made in the first year in a role. Many say when a person has changed jobs frequently, it is assumed he or she will not stay in the proposed role long enough to make a difference.

At the other end of the scale, five years seems to be the maximum time a senior employee should stay in a role, before recruiters and potential employers begin to question his or her ambition and commitment.

Many say the end of the third year is an ideal time to either change to a new role within the same organisation or move to another employer. “If you’re in a job for more than three years, that’s considered a long time these days,” Chris Le Coic of Chandler Macleod says. “Average tenure for CEOs and directors has gotten considerably shorter over the past few years.”

Le Coic attributes the change to increasing pressure on chief executives and other senior executives to perform and make changes. After a couple of years, executives have either achieved what they were brought in to do or have been moved on for nonperformance.

Le Coic says more than five years in one job would “start to become a problem. A few years ago, there would have been a much more negative perception if a résumé showed that someone moved every three years but nowadays that’s not an issue. I don’t know that there is an ideal, but I think two to three years is a good length of time.”

Derwent Executive director Chris Adams says loyalty no longer pays, with those who move between companies tending to make bigger leaps in career development and remuneration. “People do get better pay increases when they move from company to company than they do staying in one place.”

Adams also encourages Australian executives to consider overseas positions as a way of increasing their value. “A lot of senior executives should be considering getting some Asian experience or regional experience,” he says.

Hamilton James & Bruce’s Daoud Edris echoes this sentiment, saying overseas experience can look “quite attractive” on a CV, especially if it is in a big market such as the United States or Europe.

However, he warns that working overseas can create significant challenges for those who want to return to Australia afterwards. “When they want to come back, they have often advanced their careers so much that they can’t find suitable jobs back here. It’s really about managing their expectations; they might have to take a sideways step or slight backwards step to get back into the Australian market.”

Human resources executive Philip Richardson feared he had left it too late to get another job after 14 years with the same company. He was bored and knew he needed new challenges but found the prospect of job hunting daunting.

The realisation that he was approaching 50 and his boss was “not going anywhere” eventually propelled him into action: he quit and cashed in four months’ accrued leave.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” he says. “It took the full four months to find something and I did get disillusioned. It was a leap of faith but I wanted to do something before I turned 50.

“It’s like a car reaching 100,000 kilometres on the clock. It’s worth a lot less once it hits that mark.”

The position that Richardson found was a consulting role with security company Chubb and he has since become the full-time human resources director for the company, with plenty of new challenges. “It is exactly what I was looking for when I left my previous job,” he says.

So how did Richardson go about finding a new role after so long? “It was basically networking and knocking on doors. It was about building the circle that I had been revolving within. And I spent hours on the internet looking for jobs.”

Richardson, who also sought the counsel of recruiters, applied for several roles and encountered many disappointments. “I thought I had left it too late but I did eventually get what I was after,” he says.

“I would certainly encourage people to get out there and look if they have been in their job too long. I would say five years is probably the maximum that people should stay in a job these days.”
First published by Jane E. Fraser | smh.com.au | 19 January