Sunday Scaries: Was 12 years too long at one company?

As the title suggests, I worked for one company for 12 years.

Started as a Junior Recruitment Consultant/Administrator and when I left I was APAC Managing Director (you won’t see that title on my LinkedIn, story for another day).

In that time I had a couple of opportunities come to me but I hadn’t actively looked / applied for other roles for the majority of that 12 years.

But as you’ve probably heard and read a lot, there’s a view that if you stay with a company you’ll earn less than what you would if you went to a new company. I’ve seen this to be true, sometimes but not always.

A few years into that job I was approached by a competitor. At the time I was on a base of $50k a year. They offered me $80k.

This was a huge amount of money for me then, a $30k pay rise today would still be huge (might even be enough to buy the fancy chips at Woolies next shop) but I had my concerns.

Eventually I went to my boss and told her I had another offer, I wasn’t asking them to match it but I think it showed that I was underpaid. It’s testing my memory but I think I ended up getting my base to $65k.

Now some of you might read that and think I was stupid for not taking the higher base but it wasn’t just about that. I was running a desk solo so at the new company, I would have been up against 2-3 others to make commission.

I also weighed up the pecking order. I was the 5th employee in our companies Australian office so if there was to be growth and bigger roles in the future, I’d go from about 3rd in line where I was to about 8th in line at a new company.

Then other opportunities came in those years and each year, another boss I had would give me a raise. I hit targets so come January performance review, the raise he gave was usually there or there abouts to what I would have asked for, but I didn’t have to ask.

So I progressed within the same company - which is something that’s not always possible - and didn’t really have a driving reason to leave. I liked what I was doing, I was being paid fairly, the people were nice, what was I chasing?

But after saying all of that, 12 years was too long. I think. Maybe it wasn’t?

The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think these opinions or rules we spout about how long to work at a company or never accepting counter offers are blanket rules that apply to everyone in every situation.

What I would find interesting to know is how long people consider a “long” tenure for employment now?