In recent years, the employment market has seen a sea change in the behavior of American job seekers. While it was once accepted to stay at a company for years, and sometimes decades, the average American now holds around 10 jobs for the first 14 years they are in the workforce, recent research indicates.
As a result, it may even be a challenge for experienced IT works or product support experts to stay in one position after parlaying the skills they gained from online courses into lucrative positions, as there may always be a more attractive job title waiting at another company.
Dan Schawbel, a personal branding expert and the owner of Millennial Branding, LLC., spoke about his own troubles in a recent report for CNN. According to Schawbel, moving jobs within his first employer's company was one of the key benefits that let him gather new skills that would eventually help him translate this experience into a lucrative business of his own.
In addition, Schawbel says that by switching companies instead of simply moving about internally, he would have had to rebuild his network of job contacts, his professional visibility and undergo more extensive training to obtain skills that he may have needed, all of which would have potentially harmed the growth of this industry acumen.
But, while Schawbel is drawing largely from his own personal experience in the report, he solicited the thoughts of well-respected experts in the IT field that echoed his advice.
"There is always something refreshing about interviewing somebody who has been with a company five, eight or more years," Elcio Barcelos, a vice president of Global Staffing at HP, told CNN.
As a result, individuals who are currently looking for new IT jobs may want to keep this in mind, as it may be more beneficial for them to enhance their skills with the help of certified instructors outside the classroom and then use this training to move up internally in their current company.