IT Industry: Is it good to switch company for every 2 years?

In today’s world, the biggest challenge for a company is to hire that right employee who turns out to be a valuable asset. But an even bigger challenge is to retain that employee. According to recent research, employees are quitting their job very frequently and attrition rate is higher than ever. This trend is high in industry like IT , Banking , Telecom, Mobile etc.

This is so because the job hoppers tend to have a higher salary growth than to the ones who stick to the same company for a long time. So are you among the one who is thinking for the Job switch. Read out below points before you switch your current job and take decision appropriately.

Switching company every 2 years or frequently has it’s own pros and cons. I will make it more simple and short than writing lengthy topics.

Being loyal to an Organization :

Pros

• Your job become comparatively more secure when IT market is down (please note word comparatively – no job is 100% secure in IT thought it definitely increase your chances)
• You have strong relationship circle with your colleges , managers etc.
• You get to know in and out of companies process, culture, infra and people which is big USP that you will be promoted to management roles
• Being in same company can increase your chance to onsite travel
• Life is bit relaxed as you already familiar with project, process and people around you

Cons

• You need to survive on yearly increments which may not be much (2 to 10%) unless your work is unexceptionally good
• Chances are you might need to continue working on same project for years which will be in Support Project mode and there is minimum learning
• Being in same organization people tend to become lazy and this blocks their path for upgrading themselves

Being frequent Job hopper:

Pros

• You will be having competitive package in the industry
• You might get chance to work on projects which has latest technology and skills
• Since you will face frequent interviews, you will be more updated with latest technologies and skills in the market
• You will get chance to work with new people, new culture and process so learning is at it’s par

Cons

• Some companies avoid interviewing frequent job switchers as it creates question on your stability and ROI from perspective of HR
• If there is IT slowdown then you are at high risk of layoff unless you have very high dependency in current project
• You will need to take hard effort to learn new project/technology when you join new company at least for first few months to prove your value as people in new company will not be knowing you

Summary: 

At the end of story it’s completely individual decision when and how frequently switch or continue to in same organization. Above factors will surely help you to take that decision since every individual has different priority in the life and hence every person is different. As per my recommendation, I will suggest that one can switch company often during his or her first 7 to 8 years of career but it’s not much advisable to switch company frequently once you have 8 to 10 years of experience.