Why Job Hopping Should Not Be Demonized

Gregory Scott Muhs
4 min readApr 8, 2023

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During my career, I’ve had to take on a lot of short-term and contract roles. I’ve had a lot of people judge me harshly for this. Taking the opportunity for a better role is often labeled as “job hopping,” and it’s completely unjust.

There have also been times when I was at a job that was paying $11 an hour, but the other guy was offering $13.50 for a better role within the same parent organization. I took the offer. But there are those who criticize me for having chosen to move up and say I should have stayed at the $11 an hour position for 3 years, unable to pay rent and barely able to get groceries. (As I said, this move was within the same overall company.)

Most of my previous managers (with very very few exceptions) speak very highly of me and my performance. I am not super “fast” but I find ways to make the entire lab more efficient. (I have the same neurotype as Elon Musk.) And when managers see what I am capable of after the initial training period, they are very excited and praise my work.

https://pixabay.com/photos/people-business-meeting-1979261/

I once expressed concern to a manager because I was only getting through 5 boxes of samples a day for QC while other employees were getting through 6 or 7. She reassured me that this was okay, that she sees me working, and contrary to my fears she was not going to fire me. Later she had me double-checking other people’s work, and I did a small spreadsheet project that had the potential to save the lab 8 man-hours per week. (The coding for this side-project took me about 1 cumulative hour.)

After graduation, I wanted to join an academic research lab and be there for several years. I interviewed for these roles but was not given the offer. And I still had bills to pay. So I took a lot of short-term, contract, and seasonal work.

A few other times, I’ve had managers misrepresent what the job would entail. This created a very bad situation. At one “research” lab, I worked at, I stayed one hour late on a Friday night because the sample delivery was late. The next week, the entire management team scolded me for doing one hour of overtime without approval. The unprofessionalism of these individuals was truly incredible.

Contrast this with a supervisor I had at a building that was falling apart. This guy was one of the best supervisors I’ve ever had, and even though the world was being thrown at us, his leadership made it where I was happy to come to work each day. He wanted badly to extend my contract, but the finance department would not allow for it.

I was once in an interview with a professor at a university. He asked why I was only in the Biofuels research project on my resume for three months. I responded, “Well that was a semester-long undergraduate research project and I graduated.” He then responded with a snarky and sarcastic “Ohhhhh!” As if I were making this up.

Another time, I had a job that I wanted to stay with for several years until I completed my master’s. The manager was amazing, and it was an excellent company to work for. Then Covid hit, and I was out of work.

Please don’t judge people for having a different career path from you. And if you do, then do not talk about #diversityequityinclusion because if you judge people based on their circumstances instead of their character, then you don’t know what those terms mean.

Instead, understand that everybody has a different path, and talk to the people who want to come to work to make a difference.

Most recently, I had a role with a company that I had been with for almost two years. But my rent was going through the roof. My manager and the lab director teamed up to go to corporate to get me as much of a raise as possible, but corporate was only willing to give a very small raise and it was not enough. In a previous conversation, this manager said that she would have more than doubled my pay given the opportunity.

I chose to come back home and finish my last few classes of my master’s. I graduate next month with a 4.0 GPA, #PhiKappPhi, and #HonorSociety. For my final project, the client was ecstatic by the work my amazing team (whom I was honored to be a part of) put in to create an amazing product, and they also specifically praised my contribution to the project.

At the end of the day, I got that 4.0 GPA because God uplifted my mind during the studying process. I was working full-time while going to grad school, and I am very proud of my accomplishments.

Please do not judge people harshly for having to change jobs. Understand that changing jobs is hard. Sometimes a better offer comes along, sometimes a company has to lay people off, and sometimes managers are impossible to work with. Sadly, the world is a rough place these days, and sometimes even the best people have to change jobs. That’s not always their “fault” and it’s not something that should automatically be held against them.

#GodGotMeThrough #GodIsGood

#research #Science #Biotech #work #opportunity #career #training #people #job #Diversity #Equity #Equality #Inclusion #Genetics #Biochemistry #Bioinformatics

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