How Long Should Someone Stay at a Job?

How Long Should Someone Stay at a Job?

Answer by Quora user Michael O. Church, programmer and engineer.

It depends on how much you're learning and what the job is doing for your career.

In general, the numbers you want to remember are 8, 18, 48 and 72.

Future employers may perceive staying at a job for under eight months as a negative mark on your resume, unless you can point to an objective reason for your short stay (such as a large corporate action). This time period suggests that you didn't pass your six-month review or the first performance cycle. You may want to omit the job and move any accomplishments to your freelance section if you stayed for a shorter time period.

One exception to this rule is if you're affected by a news-making layoff in the first year, or ever. An unannounced small layoff (under 5% of your division) will probably look performance-related, and you should probably omit it, but when you're affected by a known layoff (such as a plant closing), there's no shame in it. With, say, a seven-month job that ended due to a large-scale, non-performance layoff, you are better off to list it on your resume.

18 months is the socially accepted minimum for staying at a job. It suggests that you survived at least one review cycle — reviews are typically annual, and employees aren't generally reviewed until they've been at the company for six months; that's where the 18-month derivation comes from — and that you achieved something in order to be retained for that long.

You can go down to nine months if you have a really good explanation, like a corporate action (merger, upper management change) that affected the nature of your work, or a family-related reason. If you come in under 18 months for some reason, it helps if you can establish that you did pass at least one performance review. (A bonus, or a round of layoffs that you survived, would suffice.)

If you had one job where you were (possibly unintentionally) bait-and-switched and you left at eight months, that's understandable. If you have five of these jobs, it looks like you're the problem. Similarly, if you leave every time the nature of the work changes, HR cynics will likely be skeptical.

Ideally, you should try to make a job span, at the minimum, 15 months spanning three calendar years (e.g. October 2014 — January 2016) or 18 months spanning two. All else being equal, two years is better than 18 months, and three years is better than two, and four is better than three. The advantage gained each month isn't enough to merit passing up obviously superior opportunities, but it does mean that you're best off to avoid movements that don't have an obvious benefit.

Four years (48 months) will get you "full credit" for working at a company, unless something makes it clear that you were an under-performer or stagnating. If you have an increasing scope of accomplishments, and preferably at least one title change, you're in good shape. If you haven't been promoted and your projects aren't getting better, you're still okay at this point — but you have approximately two years in which you can make your next move.

Six years (72 months) is the point at which it starts to hurt you if you're not getting promoted or receiving better projects. Four years with an on-boarding year and then a flat trend or lateral moves is fine; four years means you did your job, gave the company a thorough chance, didn't piss off too many people and moved on. Six or more years without an obvious record of promotion may suggest that you're unambitious and, while not necessarily expendable, thoroughly mediocre. If you keep getting promoted, however, there's no upper limit on how long you can stay at a job

Find full article at http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/job-length/
.