How much does it actually pay to switch jobs?
That’s a key question, especially at a moment when so many technologists are debating whether to pursue other opportunities. According to a new study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 40 percent of workers plan on quitting their current jobs within the next three to six months; meanwhile, multiple surveys have shown that technologists are particularly interested in finding a new, hopefully better gig.
According to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (as reported by The Wall Street Journal), those who’ve stayed in their current positions have seen their salaries rise by 4.7 percent, on average. But those who jumped jobs received a raise of 6.4 percent—the biggest gap in two decades, on average.
Inflation is helping power at least some of this job-jumping, according to the WSJ. “I think the workers are paying a lot more attention,” Prof. Yongseok Shin, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the newspaper. “They are comparing their wage growth with the headline inflation numbers.”
Employers also remain hungry for tech talent. The unemployment rate for tech occupations dipped to 1.8 percent in June, a notable decline from 2.1 percent in May; that’s well below the overall national unemployment rate of 3.6 percent. According to CompTIA, which crunched data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employers posted some 505,663 open tech jobs in June, a year-over-year rise of 62 percent.
The average technologist salary currently stands at $104,566, according to the most recent Dice Tech Salary Report. That represents a 6.9 percent increase between 2020 and 2021. With the right combination of skills and experience, of course, technologists can see their compensation climb above that level. In this current environment, it’s clear that jumping jobs is also a good way to rapidly increase salary.
