你該在一份工作上呆多久？

????邁克爾?O?切齊的回答

????這取決于你從工作中學到了多少，以及這份工作對你的職業生涯有何助益。一般而言，你應該記住幾個數字：8、18、48和72。

????8個月以內

????這是很糟糕的，除非你能找出客觀的理由（例如一場大規模的公司行為）。這表明你沒有通過6個月的評估或第一個績效周期。你最好在履歷中省略這份工作，將任何成就算入自由職業部分，或者即便包括了這份工作，也要指出這是基于具體項目的合同雇工，雖然對方提供了更多項目，但被你拒絕。沒錯，我建議你在簡歷中省略某些內容。有些東西太糟糕了，只能被拋棄，其中就包括低于8個月的工作。只要你沒有編造自己的成就，這樣的處理便不能算是欺詐和不道德的謊言。你沒有試圖誤導人們對你的看法；你在清理自己的過去，幫助面試官避免因為你經歷過的無關議題而浪費時間。

????有一種例外，你在第一年受到被媒體關注的裁員事件影響。未公布的小規模裁員（低于部門的5%）會被視為與績效有關，你應該隱瞞這樣的事實，但如果你受到眾所周知的裁員（如工廠關閉）的影響，就沒有必要感到難為情。比如，如果一份僅從事了7個月時間的工作，因為與績效無關的大規模裁員而被迫結束，你最好在簡歷中列出，沒有必要隱瞞。

????18個月

????這是社會公認的下限。這意味著你至少安然度過了一個評估周期——績效評估通常應該按年進行，而且公司只會對工作滿6個月的員工進行評估；這正是18個月這個數字的由來——你必須取得一定的成績，才能留在這家公司那么長時間。如果有好的解釋，比如公司行為（并購、管理層變動等）影響了你的工作性質，或者因為家庭因素，9個月也可以接受。

????如果因為某些原因工作時間不足18個月，只要你能證明自己經歷過一次績效評估，也會對求職有所幫助。（獲得過一筆獎金或在一輪裁員后留了下來，就足夠了。）盡管如此，這樣的短期工作不能太多。如果你在一份工作中（可能是無意地）“被誘騙”，工作僅8個月就離職是可以理解的。但如果有五份工作均是如此，這似乎就是你的問題了。同樣，如果你每一次離職都是因為工作性質變化，憤世嫉俗的人力資源部會對你產生懷疑。（我個人倒覺得對工作的這種挑剔令人欽佩，只可惜我不是規則制定者。）如果你說自己總是被騙（因為這很常見），人力資源部門會認為，你接受那些工作的時候沒有合理預期。

????除非這份工作非常糟糕，否則你應該至少將這份工作做滿15個月，跨越3個日歷年（例如10月14日至1月16日），或者做滿18個月，跨越2個日歷年。我也不喜歡這些規則，不過許多公司非常不待見前一份工作只干了6至17個月的員工（不足6個月的工作可以不寫入簡歷），因為他們無處可逃，但這就是現實。

????在其他方面相同的情況下，兩年好于18個月，三年好于兩年，四年好于三年。雖然多一個月所帶來的優勢并不值得你放棄顯然更好的發展機會，但它卻意味著你很好地避免了沒有明顯好處的跳槽行為。

????Answer by Michael O. Church

????It depends how much you’re learning and what the job is doing for your career. In general, the numbers you want to remember are 8, 18, 48 and 72.

????Under 8 months

????This is perceived to be terrible, unless you can point to an objective reason (such as a large corporate action). It suggests that you didn’t pass your 6-month review or the first performance cycle. You may want to omit the job and move any accomplishments to your freelance section, or include the job but say it was a project-specific contract role, and that you were offered more projects but declined. Yes I’m advocating that you omit something on your resume. Some things are so bad that you should drop them, and jobs under 8 months almost always qualify. As long as you don’t make accomplishments up, it’s not the deceptive and unethical type of lie. You’re not trying to mislead anyone about yourself; you’re cleaning your past to avoid wasting the interviewer’s time on irrelevant issues about things that have happened to you.

????One exception is if you’re affected by a news-making layoff in the first year, or ever. An unannounced small layoff (under 5% of your division) will be assumed to be performance-related and you should hide it, but when you’re affected by a known layoff (such as a plant closing) that everyone knows about, there’s no shame in it. With, say, a 7-month job that ended due to a large-scale, non-performance layoff you are better off to list it than hide it.

????18 months

????This is the socially accepted minimum. It suggests that you survived at least one review cycle — reviews are presumed to be annual, and people aren’t reviewed until 6 months old; that’s where the 18-month derivation comes from — and had to achieve something to be retained for that long. You can go down to 9 if you have a really good explanation, like a corporate action (i.e. merger, upper management change) that affected the nature of your work, or a family-related reason.

????If you come in under 18 months for some reason, it helps if you can establish that you did pass at least one performance review. (A bonus, or a round of layoffs that you survived, would suffice.) Even then, you can’t have too many of those, however. If you had one job where you were (possibly unintentionally) bait-and-switched and left at 8 months, that’s understandable. If you have five, it looks like the problem is you. Similarly, if you leave every time the nature of the work changes, HR cynics will be skeptical. (I see that as an admirable selectiveness in the work one does, but I don’t make the rules.) If your story is that you keep getting bait-and-switched (because it is, well, common) the HR cynics will think that you go into jobs with unreasonable expectations.

????Unless the job is terrible, you should try to make it span, at the minimum, 15 months spanning three calendar years (e.g. Oct. ’14 to Jan. ’16) or 18 months spanning two. I don’t like these rules, and a lot of companies abuse people during the 6 to 17-month spell (before the 6-month mark, the job can just be taken off the resume) because they are captive, but that’s how it is.

????All else being equal, two years is better than 18 months, and three years is better than two, and four is better than three. The advantage gained each month isn’t enough to merit passing up obviously superior opportunities, but it does mean that you’re best off to avoid movements that don’t have an obvious benefit.