how long to stay at first job after college before moving on?

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: Descartes
I don't even remember how long I stayed at my first job, but 2 years was a long time to me back then.

I wouldn't put a timetable on it. Leave when you've gained everything you need to move forward. If you don't feel like you're moving forward, then it might be time to find a place where you can. Time is of the essence; staying idly by while everyone else gains the experience puts you further behind.

That said, I think you can usually gain the experience needed at a given company within 12 months, sometimes even less. After 24 months, my experience shows that things tend to be more rhythmic, which in the early stages of your career is a bad thing.

In short: Take the experience and run, imo. Soak up what they have to offer, concentrate on areas that are most applicable to the industry and not just to the company for whom you are working, and then start shopping around.

This is what I've heard from a few people... there was someone in specific I was talking to locally that was with a big company like GE (maybe it was GE themselves) for less than a year, learned what they had to teach him, and then took off and did his own thing. Today, he's doing very well and you can bet that he's happy.

I might not have as much corporate experience, but my naive thought is that if you do what you find to be logical, that's usually the best choice. There was a thread here about an intern not having enough things to fill up his time, some said to deal with it as an intern, while others were saying that the time you're in your seat doesn't equal a certain amount of work done, and so you should either be there and productive, or it isn't beneficial.

Overall, my thought is that if I'm not furthering something (the business, myself, etc.), then I need to reconsider what I'm doing as an employee. Most of my work is with startups and so they're strapped for resources anyway and so they have to make their dollars go twice as far as a larger organization, but I think the mentality of not getting stuck in a daily grind is very important.

OP - if you get an interview with someone else and they ask why you're leaving so soon, it might be worth mentioning to them the issue you were facing. If you spent the whole day filling out TPS reports, say that. One of the things someone I look up to says is that you should fall fast. If you try something and it doesn't work, let it go, move on and take what you learned.

 

[Cutterhead]

Originally posted by: fritolays

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
What are you in now and what do you want to be doing?

Learning SAP and doing consulting
the career progression is very limited if I stay on this path

I have to disagree with you there. If you are thinking consulting isn't for you, then you may be wise to put in your 2 weeks now and find something that you enjoy doing. But there certainly are opportunities to build a good career for yourself in the path you are on now, at least from my experience. My first job out of college was also in SAP consulting.

I started in early 2004, and for the first year+ I did little more than paper pushing for project management. Typically these projects are very large and complex, and there is an extended period of learning the ropes... understanding how these large-scale ERP implementations work. After that, I was able to pick a particular facet of SAP that interested me (within the scope of the project), take some training, and move into a position to develop/support that portion of the implementation. I spent the next 3 years or so doing SAP development and only recently left to go out as an independent contractor.

In my one and only job move so far, I literally doubled my income. Perhaps that's a sign that I stuck aorund too long (or that I was very underpaid ) but I think it is also a testament to the excellent experience I obtained by doing just that.

If you do decide to pursue a career in SAP consulting, my only advice would be to learn as much as you can now while you have the opportunity... get as much experience as you can in an area of SAP that interests you, and tough it out as long as that experience continues to be new and enlightening. When that stops happening, you can leverage what you have learned to move on to something better. Really, no different than what you would do in any other field of work.