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To hop or not to hop, that is the question. These days people change jobs much more frequently. The belief for the employee is that if you change jobs more often, you can more rapidly increase your job responsibility, your income, and your experience. Sometimes this works. It can also be that by trying many jobs in your early years, you can find a happier situation, one that you would like to remain in for some years.

But it also happens that employers sometimes become reluctant to hire someone who has a history of short employment, and this can be a liability in job security. From the employer's perspective, job-hopping might be a sign that the employee is difficult to work with. Short employment might be a sign that the employee finds it difficult to get along with their co-workers or that they have a bad attitude towards their superiors, customers, or their work. Perhaps they quit whenever the going gets rough. From the employer's perspective, not only do they wish to avoid a problematic employee, but employees of under a year or two generally are not as valuable as those who know their jobs and the company well. Employers must invest some paid work hours into training or orienting new employees, therefore, workers who stay with them more years will save them time and often money as well.

So how can you tell when it's okay, or even beneficial to hop? The ideal situation would be not only when your new employment would offer you greater advantage, but also when you can leave your former employers knowing you had already accomplished above and beyond what was usually expected for that term of employment. You want to be able to justify your worth and reliability to future employers * even with short employment * by being able to demonstrate what you did for your previous employers that made your employment well worth-while. If you wish to job hop to your advantage, then always look for what extra things you can do for your current employer, that can be put into your resume. Things such as: "increased sales 60%," "proposed and initiated a new service to the business," or, "acquired an additional $80,000 annual contract," will definitely say to future employers that you are a valuable employee.