Men and women who have successfully navigated the waters (more often rapids and heavy surf) of data processing have been helped by a developed sense of when to make a career move. Many others fail to do this and lose the opportunity for advancement.
For example, many bright young programmers or software engineers begin their career with a bang. Their work is exemplary and they are in a company that rewards them with periodic and sizable raises.
That sounds good, of course, and it is, if these people stop at some point and weigh the next raise against making a vertical move to another plateau such as systems analyst, or moving into a position of senior software engineer.
No one can tell you when that decision should be made. In fact, no one can tell you what your decision should be when you reach that point. The salient principle here is that you should be aware that in most careers there might come a time to leave a comfortable, rewarding job for one that may not work out as well, but that offers possible growth. That risk has to be balanced with the reality that if you don't make that move, you may be unwilling to do it a few years down the road.
Of course, this can happen to anyone at any level of data processing. Someone who has risen to a position of project leadership, perhaps after ten years in the field, sees the next career move to, perhaps, first- or second-line management. Being a project leader is a position of authority and responsibility, and carries with it generally impressive financial compensation. Do you continue in your present position and stay with it for the rest of your data processing career, or do you take a chance and risk it all for potentially greater rewards?
People face this kind of decision in every walk of life. Game-show contestants very often are called upon to gamble what they've already won in order to win more.
Airline pilots are another example. When the Boeing 747 jumbo jet was introduced, pilots with certain major airlines who wished to upgrade from smaller aircraft to the new craft went through a period of transitional training. They were allowed to fail once and to return to their previous position as captain of a smaller jet. But if they failed a second time, it was the end of their career. Commanding a 747 paid significantly more money than did the same position with 707s and 727s, but reaching for the higher rung was fraught with peril.
Successful vice-presidents in large corporations are often lured by headhunters into accepting the presidency of a smaller, riskier company. Actors and actresses often must decide whether to leave the security of a long-running television series to take a more challenging and iffy role on Broadway.
The list goes on. Everyone is faced with these decisions at various times in their career, and they are decisions that should be carefully weighed.
The question of job hopping often comes up here. It poses less of a problem and carries less stigma than it did years ago, when someone was expected to find a job and stay with the company until retirement. Today's educated and skilled young data processors see frequent job change as the fast track toward bigger and better jobs, higher salaries, and keeping up with the state of the art. Studies peg turnover for systems analysts and programmers at between 10 and 20 percent. It's not unusual these days to run into people in data processing who have had ten or twelve jobs over a fifteen-year stretch.
Does it hurt you to have switched jobs often? It depends upon who is in the position to hire you next. Some managers are highly skeptical of people who have jumped from job to job, but a lot depends upon that employer's corporate culture and upon the nature of its business. A large, monolithic organization will prize job stability far more than a smaller, more dynamic shop where turnover represents an influx of new ideas and energy. DPers who have worked in a variety of settings have amassed broad knowledge, which can benefit a new employer.
On the flip side of the coin, losing data processors after training them costs money, to say nothing of the turmoil it creates within a department. When everything is taken into consideration, industry estimates of what it costs a company to lose a good DPer after only a year on the job run anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000. Suffer enough of these losses and it's understandable why companies look for people who will stay around awhile.
Hiring professionals apply one basic rule to the question of whether someone has changed jobs too often, and that's whether each change represented a step up into a better position, more responsibility and challenge, and higher pay. If they haven't, it's assumed that the frequent changes reflect basic instability in the individual, rather than having an eye out for opportunity.
For some reason, many people equate advancement with leaving a job. It doesn't have to be that way, not if you are open to the potentials within your current organization and adopt the attitude of constantly being "interviewed" for that better inside job. If those potentials truly aren't there, then by all means look to other companies.
