Congrats on the New Job! Is It Time to Start Looking for a New One?

Every college grad worries, at repeated points in their career, about how time spent at a particular job or the total number of jobs on a résumé might look to potential employers. For decades, the rule of thumb has been that you absolutely, positively have to stay in a job for one year or more — but that’s definitely changing, and not just for millennials.

Switching jobs every few years is the new norm across generations, according to Fortune, and FastCompany reports that not only is job-hopping losing its negative stigma, that among people born between 1982 and 2002, a full 26 percent believe that you should start looking for something new before a year is up. (Only 13 percent say more than five years.)

Why the difference? Young people tend to believe that loyalty is a two-way street. “Especially in this economy, things that demonstrated loyalty from an employer to an employee are disappearing,” says Lydia Frank of PayScale, which just published a survey about Gen Y at Work. “There’s just not this sense in the job market that your employer is necessarily going to take care of you.”

In Bentley University’s own PreparedU study, only 55 percent of millenials say they’re loyal to their companies — compared to 69 percent for other generations. But millennials also don’t keep a double standard: 51 percent of millennials say they don’t expect their company to be loyal to them. (It is also true that a later PreparedU study found that 80 percent of millennials expected to work for four or fewer companies over the course of their career.)

Job hopping lost much of its stigma after the Great Recession, which forced many workers to move around quite a bit and “many hiring managers are sensitive to that,” James Wright, a partner of Bridge Technical Talent, an information technology staffing firm, recently told MainStreet. “Some job hopping in the past few years can be explained away a lot better than it would have 10 years ago. The workforce has become more accepting of moving around, and increasingly there are places that consider a variety of experiences at different locations as a way people can increase their skills.”

One such place is top global advertising agency Saatchi + Saatchi, whose CEO of 17 years told Entrepreneur that his secret for keeping employees is actually to let them go. Kevin Roberts knows that if he gives his employees four things — responsibility, learning, recognition and joy — they will want to come back. And when they do, they will return even smarter and more skilled. “We’ve had people who have left nine times, but have come back 10,” says Roberts. Saatchi + Saatchi has 6,000 employees, but loses one-third of them every year — effectively turning over the entire staff every three years.

If you are worried about how job hopping looks on your résumé, Business News Daily has three smart ways to address frequent job changes, including being honest about your reasons for job hopping, highlighting your skills and experience, and reassuring your potential employer about your commitment and desire to work for them, in particular.