Job Hopping Paid Off For Older Workers. Gen Z May Miss Its Chance

Forbes Daily Briefing · Oct 7, 2026 · 6m

After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2019 with a bachelor’s in business analytics and finance, Megan Lieu took a job at EY Consulting. She spent two years there and then began job hopping, staying at one place for just six months. Yet each of her three moves, she proudly recalls, brought her a hefty income bump of around 20%. Now 30 and self-employed since 2024, Lieu advises friends and new grads not to job hop as she did, because it just doesn’t pay these days. She left her first job in 2021, she explains, “during the initial boom of the post-COVID era when many people were…