Length of service--how often to change (strike III and I'm out!)

Subject: Length of service--how often to change (strike III and I'm out!)
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 10:38:21 -0400

Keith Soltys reports: <<In the present economomy, or in the economy that
we've had over the last five years or so, there is no stability and it
doesn't matter who you work for. In my case, I've had 4 jobs in the previous
9 years, three of those I
lost due to downsizings, mergers, or closings.>>

Oops! I should've emphasized in my post that this obviously varies from
sector to sector. My stay at my previous job (federal government) was 7
years, and I only left because I had an opportunity to return home to
Montreal; there was a possibility I would've been relocated or offered a
golden handshake in another 2 years, but nobody was losing any sleep over it
when I left. My current job is at a research institute doing work for the
forest industry (_very_ cyclical, thus prone to recessions and downsizings);
I've been here more than 8 years, and see only one reason why I wouldn't
retire here (basically, my fiance is American, and I'll probably move down
to the Boston area eventually). And by the way, we've been in existence for
25 years with not a single downsizing. Excellent and humane management has
gotten us through possibly the worst recession the forest industry has ever
had in the past 25 years with nary a scratch. In another post, I mentioned
that stability varies among industries, and that dotcoms and other young
startups are most vulnerable. Mature industries _can_ be more stable (as in
my example), but as the auto industry indicates, maturity isn't a guarantee
of security either.

<<I think you have to consider the reasons why people leave jobs as well as
the length of their service - and that's something that you usually can't
asses just from reading a resumé.>>

That's certainly true, and my previous postings on this topic indicate that
I'm a foe of simplistic screening techniques. But I confess guiltily that if
I had 100 resumes to screen, and only 20 of them showed stays of longer than
5 years, I'd restrict my screening to those 20 resumes, and only return to
the other 80 if I couldn't find a suitable candidate in the first 20. Yes,
that's evil and lazy; it's also common. Why else do HR departments screen
out excellent candidates based on tool skills? Because they don't have the
time to examine each resume on its own merits. I don't defend this approach;
I merely report it as common in my own experience.

<<Company pension plans are not the norm in Canada, if you are talking about
a pension plan and not a group RRSP -- they're common only in large
companies or ones that have unions.>>

Good point. I made the classic error of not defining my assumptions; that
earlier post I mentioned related to large, stable companies, and that was at
the back of my mind when I composed my post. There's obviously a fair bit of
variation in the types of retirement plans available.

<<And the employer paid portion of the RRSP is usually smaller than the
employee contribution and you can usually take that one with youi or
transfer it with no problems.>>

Taking it with isn't the problem; the problem is that if you haven't stayed
around long enough to get past the "early retirement" penalty, you may not
get the full benefit of the investments. At both places where I've worked,
the "present net worth" of the pension that I took with me and rolled into
my RSP (the _rough_ equivalent of a U.S. IRA) was always lower than its real
value had I stayed for 25 years or more. Again, I neglected to spell out my
assumptions.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"Do I contradict myself?/ Very well, then I contradict myself,/ I am large,
I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman

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