Two Years and Out, or Twenty Years and In: Career Mobility in India and Colombia

🇮🇳 India · 🇨🇴 Colombia

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

India's tech sector treats a resume with one employer on it as faintly suspicious — evidence of either complacency or a lack of options. Colombia, especially outside its largest cities, still treats a long tenure as evidence of character. Both countries are right, by their own logic, and both would consider the other's approach a little unhinged.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇳 India

🇨🇴 Colombia

India's job-hopping culture is a rational response to a market that has, for two decades, rewarded movement more reliably than it has rewarded patience. National attrition actually eased to roughly 16.2 percent in 2025, its lowest in five years, and IT-sector attrition is projected to settle into the 13–15 percent range in 2026 — but even that "cooled off" number means one in seven to eight employees changes jobs in a given year, a rate that would alarm HR departments almost anywhere in the OECD. Nearly three-quarters of Indian exits are voluntary, well above the 50–66 percent typical of global markets, and the reason shows up consistently in industry surveys: inadequate compensation and limited internal career growth, not dissatisfaction with the work itself. Lateral moves into cloud, AI, and cybersecurity roles are now outpacing traditional vertical promotions as the primary growth path, and with 84 percent of India's Gen Z workforce reportedly planning to pursue a new role in 2026, employer loyalty as a concept is being actively redefined by the people entering the workforce, not eroded by the people already in it.

Colombia's labor market moves too, but through a different mechanism. DANE's household survey data shows average monthly hiring and separation rates both hovering in the high single digits — real churn, but distributed unevenly: Bogotá, Medellín, and Santander post stronger formal-employment stability, while other departments carry structural informality that makes any single job feel more precarious and any stable one worth protecting. Colombia's Hofstede profile is strongly collectivist, and that shows up directly in hiring: family-run and family-influenced companies are common, hiring decisions often run partly through personal trust networks, and loyalty to an employer functions less like a strategic bet and more like an extension of loyalty to a social circle.

What that means in practice is that "getting ahead" in Colombia often looks like getting known — visibly, patiently, over years — rather than getting recruited. It's a slower path, and a less portable one; the trust an employee builds with one company doesn't transfer to a resume line the way a title and tenure do in India's market. It also means a Colombian employee weighing whether to leave a company is weighing something India's job-hopping culture has mostly stopped asking employees to weigh at all: what happens to the relationships, not just the paycheck.

The Reckoning. The two systems reward almost opposite instincts. India has built, functionally, an internal gig economy inside full-time employment — permanent contracts, temporary intentions — where staying put for a decade can look less like loyalty and more like a failure to notice the market moved on without you. Colombia has preserved something closer to the older global default, where tenure is currency precisely because the relationships built over years are harder to replace than the salary bump from leaving. Neither is more "modern" than the other; India's system is a direct product of a labor market with abundant, fast-scaling tech demand and comparatively weak internal promotion pipelines, while Colombia's reflects a market where formal-sector stability is scarcer and more worth protecting once secured. A manager who assumes an Indian hire will be a flight risk within two years, or that a Colombian hire is under-ambitious for staying five, is reading the wrong market's signal.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

TeamBlind — A widely upvoted thread on record IT-sector attrition captured the prevailing sentiment among Indian tech workers bluntly: staying at one company past the point your skills have appreciated in the market is treated less as loyalty than as a pricing mistake.

TeamBlind — A separate thread making the case for deliberate job-hopping argued that switching roles every 18 months to two years isn't cynicism but simple arithmetic, given how much larger the average raise is when changing employers versus staying and waiting for an internal review cycle.

Quora — A response on Latin American hiring norms noted that family-oriented business culture in Colombia and the wider region means hiring relatives is common and generally accepted rather than viewed as nepotism, which surprises newcomers who expect merit-only advancement.

Quora — Someone describing how Colombians are perceived in business contexts pointed out that Colombian professionals are widely seen as unusually hard workers once they migrate abroad, which locals attribute partly to a domestic culture that rewards visible effort and dependability over self-promotion.

Substack (theredquest.substack.com) — A career newsletter aimed at a global audience argued flatly that company loyalty as a concept is functionally dead in fast-moving labor markets, and that switching jobs every 18 months to two years has become the default strategy for maximizing both pay and title growth.

Conclusion

If you're building a career in India, treat your resume as a portfolio you actively manage — benchmark your market value regularly, and don't apologize for leaving when the numbers say you should. If you're building one in Colombia, treat your reputation as the asset instead — the trust you accumulate at a company, and in a professional community, moves slower than a salary negotiation but often pays out longer.

The version I'd give a friend: in India, ask what a job is paying you today, because next year is somebody else's job to worry about. In Colombia, ask who you're becoming known as, because that follows you longer than any single paycheck does.