Is job hopping still a strategy worth pursuing?

Is job hopping still a strategy worth pursuing in 2026 and beyond? This was an interesting conversation I had with a job seeker today.

As a scientist, I benefited tremendously from job hopping. Between 2015 and 2019, I worked at 4 different pharmaceutical companies and doubled my salary from $32K to $64K.

I remember talking to a colleague who worked in the lab adjacent to mine, who had been employed with the company for over 10 years. At the time, she hadn't cleared $30K. I can still see her exact facial expression when she told me that she hadn't received a pay raise in years.

If job hopping is something you're interested in to ensure your salary grows over time, it's a path that's still available to pursue. But my recommendations on how to do this have shifted a bit in our post-AI world.

1. If you're planning to leave for a company or industry that's investing in generative or agentic AI, it's worthwhile to find people who are using AI in the workplace to learn from them. If your company has programs available to develop AI literacy, or if there's a dedicated team that's integrating AI into operations, I would find ways to get involved.

2. If you're planning to pursue a role that's being democratized by AI, where human expertise is being traded for AI outputs, (i.e. junior developers, entry-level HR, accounting), understand that your salary increases will likely be on the smaller side going forward. This is what I'm currently experiencing with my job seekers, and I don't see this trend changing.

3. If you're pursuing a role that's becoming more seniorized by AI, where human expertise is becoming more premium, (i.e. engineers, customer success managers, consultants), your challenge will be to show that you can essentially perform two or more jobs at the same time. You'll be part AI specialist, part senior manager/strategist in some cases, and you'll be expected to absorb more responsibilities as you continue in your role. But the good news: you should be able to chase bigger salary increases over time, as long as our macros remain relatively stable.

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