Jump Around: Is Job Hopping A Bad Thing?

In our minds at least, there’s something sketchy about a serial job hopper. Short stints at several jobs in a row can raise a justified red flag for an employer or recruiter, and it’s the rare type of information that actually jumps off a resume. So why do we do it? And more to the point, is job hopping actually a bad thing?

In a recently conducted survey of more than a thousand millennials between the ages of 22 and 35, 83% admitted that job hopping might be frowned upon by prospective employers. Even more of the same group—86%—said they’d be willing to jump around themselves to pursue their career or personal passions nonetheless. The data might be slightly skewed given that 74% of the survey group also self-reported that they were currently searching for a job, but the information is still telling. The survey also jives with the perception that millennials as a whole are more prone to hopping from job to job, but that conclusion is as misleading as it is unfounded. If anything, the reason we think of millennials as the type to jump around is because millennials are—for the most part—the youngest generation in the current professional workforce. Unlike the middle-aged and older generations of the workforce, young people are less apt to stay at a job for a long time, but that’s a part of career-building and not specific to millennials.

Data shows that millennials actually aren’t any more likely to jump from job to job as previous generations when it comes to their early professional lives. And if anything there’s reason to encourage millennials to do a little more jumping around. High job turnover among a generational workforce can be a good thing, signaling that better, more high-paying jobs are out there, and an employee is far more likely to benefit from a salary increase when switching jobs than s/he is from a raise. (For reference, wages are on track to grow just 0.3% from a year ago, according to salary-tracking company Payscale.)

So should you be worried about your job hopping ways? Probably not, but, to be fair, high job turnover early in your career might reflect poorly if you’re constantly moving laterally, and there’s obvious cause for concern if you’re somehow moving backwards. But if you can prove that you’re moving from one job to another in the name of elevated responsibility, and most importantly, higher pay, that’s a bargaining chip on your job hunt, not a liability. Nonetheless, years on end of moving around not only might raise questions from an employer, it’s also no way to live. Part of the reason we’re compelled to look for new jobs in the first place is the hope that there’s a better fit somewhere else out there. Oftentimes that’s true, and no career adviser would tell a millennial to stay at a job that’s holding them back. Ultimately, millennials shouldn’t be afraid to jump from job to job as long as the movement is for the right reasons. But some common advice applies here too: you need to know a good thing when you see it.