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When to Start Looking for a New Job

Tuesday, 31st of August 2010

On graduate-jobs.com I wrote a blog about job hopping; when it is appropriate, what impact, both negative and positive, it can have on your career and how it looks to employers. A part of this is especially relevant to you, the users of second-jobber.com - when you should start looking to leave your current job and move to another.

It won't come as a surprise that the answer to this is very situation specific. The "situation" can be a number of things but the art is reading your available options and (the harder skill) reading your future options. What will finding a new job achieve that staying in your current position and working towards promotion, won't? The answer may be money, it may be enjoyment, it may be long term prospects but if it isn't any of these then maybe you should question why you are considering changing jobs.

However, we all have to move on at some point and a good rule of thumb to have is that if you haven't seen any progression in your career within the first two to three years of your first graduate jobs then it may be a worthwhile decision to start looking for your second (and where else, than second-jobber.com, eh?).

So does that mean there is a period of time that is too short to consider moving on? Unfortunately, the answer to that is also a bit of a murky one. Obviously, if a full time job is on your CV which you were only in for a week alarm bells will start ringing loudly in employers' heads when they're considering you for a role. Why did you leave so quickly? Did you have an argument with your boss? Are you hard to work with? Did you not get on with your fellow employees? These are all suspicions that even if you honestly answer were not the real issue will linger in recruiters' heads. Also you better have a very good reason why you did leave, and it can't be "the job wasn't for me," because that shows you didn't give it a chance and screams capriciousness.

What you must consider is what a "sellable job" is, and by that I mean a job where you would have stayed there long enough to learn skills that will be beneficial to future employers. This varies between graduate roles, some jobs are rather simple and you will learn everything you will ever do in that job within six months, others may need two years before you are fully acquainted with the role. As an objective minimum I would say stay in a job at least three to four months but even then that is the very bottom end.

Everyone knows that feeling of working up the learning curve when you land a new job and especially your first, graduate job. When that peters out and you feel comfortable you can start looking for other jobs because it usually means you've learnt all you need to know and become accustomed to the tasks. However, at that point you may want to hang around a bit, now that you are finally fully acquainted with the job.

To less of a degree, the reverse of staying in your job too long can have negative effects. If you have not been promoted and stay in a job for several years before leaving this shows other employers two things; that you were not a hard/skilled enough worker to receive a promotion and that you have little determination and aspiration to better yourself because if you did you would have left much earlier.

So the best advice one can offer is to always have your finger on the pulse and be aware of where your career is heading and base your decision upon that. That which makes your quality of life the greatest for the longest length of time is the best option, it's simply a matter of working out which path leads to that.