Back in the day, it was considered a sign of loyalty and longevity to stick with one employer for decades and then retire (maybe with a fat pension or a gold watch in return). With today’s job environment, that’s no longer a viable option for many of us. How long you stay at a company can still say much about you as a potential employee, however: Stay too short a time at several jobs and you’ll be deemed a job hopper; too long, and you might be considered unmotivated or set in your ways.

Most people change jobs for better opportunities: a higher salary, more benefits, and/or a better title with more challenging work. You can often get that in the same company through promotions, but in this era of raise freezes and “you’re lucky you even have a job” mentality, advancement doesn’t always happen and we might end up stagnant in the same position for years because of the job security.

Switching jobs may be the clearest way to get a higher salary and boost your future earning potential. Research suggests you could earn 18 to 20 percent more as an external hire than through moving up in a company via a promotion.

The other thing to consider is how old you are. In Learn Vest’s profiles of workers who have stayed put for many years, the financial advice site notes that salaries tend to hit their plateau when people are in their forties—and finding a new opportunity gets harder past the age of 45. That means if you’re approaching forty, the next few years could be the best time to go for a higher paying, higher position job.

Finally, besides losing earning potential, not advancing can also affect how hiring managers look at you.

Learn Vest says:

There’s a point at which staying too long at one job—around eight to 10 years—can raise questions about how a professional will adapt to a new environment.

 

Here are ways to use frequent job changes to create stability in your life:

1. Build up a strong skill set quickly.
Go to a job to work on a great project, and leave when your learning curve flattens out. The faster you build up your skills to create an expertise, the faster you will be able to set yourself apart from everyone else, and find good jobs quickly.2. Get good at making transitions.
There are moments in a person’s life that typically throw everything out of whack because you can’t continue working in your job. Sickness, relocation, unexpected wrenches in one’s plan. When you are used to changing jobs, and you have taught yourself to deal with work transitions, then when your personal life requires huge transition, your work can accommodate that instead of get in the way. Changing jobs will be easy.

3. Make the most of the in-between-jobs time.
You can use job changes to make transition less risky. It’s very hard to know if you’ll like something until you try it. If you have been in corporate marketing for ten years and you want to try entrepreneurship, that feels like a big risk. But if you think you might like to start your own business but you’re not sure, taking a pause in between jobs to try this new business isn’t such a risky move at all.

4. Get out of paying your dues.
The idea of paying dues worked fine when there was actually payoff (think: Retirement communities in Florida funded by pensions.) But today paying dues doesn’t have nearly the payoff it used to, and in fact, creates instability by creating unreasonable expectations for a job you become overly invested in. So get out of paying dues by changing jobs frequently.

5. Keep your finances in order.
As long as you keep your overhead down, so that you don’t need a salary that requires 100-hour work weeks, then job hopping is actually a way to ensure financial stability. You know you are not going to stay at a job forever, and you don’t know when it will end. But you will always able to get work when your needs or your company’s needs change if you are good at changing jobs. This won’t be true, however, if you are a financial mess and have enormous overhead.

The best financial security today is to have great job hunting skills that never stop. Go to the best job, do it until you find another best job. This is the kind of person who will always be able to get money when they need it.

And don’t let people tell you that job hoppers will get penalized in the marketplace. Generation Y is job hopping every other year, and they are in incredible demand throughout the workplace. Demographics are shifting, and forcing hiring practices to shift as well. Take advantage of this. Create a stable life by getting good at changing jobs.