Maybe Job-Hopping Isn’t the Smartest Career Move After All

Research suggests that employees who stay put win faster promotions and more pay than serial job switchers.

For decades, the standard advice for getting ahead in your career was simple: Act like a free agent, changing employers for the best opportunities.

The strategy makes sense. It fits our sense that our employers aren’t looking out for us, and that we must take control of our careers. It’s also a story that fits a fast-changing world where no employer seems stable enough to offer us long-term progression.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong?

I’ve spent more than 20 years studying how modern careers really unfold. Over that time, I’ve come to believe that, contrary to the standard advice, staying put can often be the fastest path to success.

It’s what I call the “insider advantage”: Across several dimensions of career success—including promotion, performance, pay and even happiness—the evidence suggests that sticking it out for the long haul can often give an employee a competitive advantage.

Moving up

Consider career progression. Most of us want to move up into more challenging and rewarding jobs over time. That progression, it turns out, overwhelmingly takes place by internal promotions. In a 2015 study, we asked M.B.A. alumni about the number of people they had been responsible for managing in each of their jobs since graduation. We found that the average move across firms took alumni into jobs where they managed exactly the same number of people as in the job they had left. When alumni moved between jobs within the same firm, though, they almost doubled the number of people they were managing.

Research from very different settings comes to similar conclusions. For example, a 2019 study looked at nearly 60,000 Finns working in over 1,000 firms. Although many of those Finns switched companies during the study, those moves were overwhelmingly into other jobs at a similar level. In fact, employees were almost six times as likely to get a meaningful promotion by moving within a firm compared with moving across firms. A 2021 study of the careers of top executives by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and IE University in Spain found that 74% of those executives entered their roles from within the company.

Each of these studies highlights the same problem with building a career by moving across employers: Career progression usually requires persuading an employer to let you do something that is more difficult and important than the kind of work you’ve done in the past. Unlike your current employer, new bosses know very little about you and are usually reluctant to take that kind of risk.

Performance and pay

A second factor we look for in our careers is the opportunity to be good at what we do and be recognized for our success. Yet several studies have found that new hires can struggle to perform effectively, and can often take two to three years to fully establish themselves at a new employer.

For example, a 2008 study of equity analysts by Harvard professors found that those analysts’ performance dropped when they moved firms, and didn’t return to its previous level for more than two years.

My own 2011 study of investment bankers found that new hires underperformed internally promoted employees, and that this gap persisted for a couple of years. A 2018 study of store managers conducted by a Michigan State professor and his colleagues also found that externally hired managers underperformed their internal colleagues.

The lesson: It takes a long time to become effective in a new organization. For one thing, new employees need to build relationships in their new workplace, establishing the kind of trust and understanding that is necessary for effective collaboration. They also need to become familiar with the organization’s culture and processes if they are to do their best work.

Most of us also want to be paid well. Although we often receive pay raises when we move firms, most of the evidence suggests that stayers do better over the long run. Economics studies going back decades have found that people who have been with their firms longer tend to earn more—despite the common assumption that the best way to get a good raise is to jump ship.

In my own analysis of careers data from the 2022 Wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I found that people who had moved employers more frequently since their mid-20s were earning less by their mid-30s compared with those who had moved fewer times, even after adjusting for differences in education, gender and ethnicity.

The happiness equation

Finally, there’s happiness. Staying longer in one organization won’t necessarily make you happier, but studies do show that work happiness and general life satisfaction are strongly correlated with having frequent interactions with co-workers and more trust in managers. The longer you are in a job, the more you get to know your colleagues and your managers, building the quality of those working relationships. And once you do find yourself in a place where you have those strong relationships, the greater the personal costs of moving.

I’m not saying that moving firms is always a mistake. Changing employers makes sense if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, if you feel underpaid or otherwise underappreciated, or if you don’t see internal opportunities to grow your career.

But when you do move, think carefully about what you are looking for. Prioritize employers where you see room to grow in the long term. And realize that as much as we tend to celebrate the broad leap, sometimes the more powerful career move is the one that doesn’t look like a move at all.

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