Stick to your job to become the top dog at work

Charlie Bell began his career flipping burgers at the Kingsford outlet of McDonald's in Sydney at a young age of just 15. He became Australia's youngest store manager by 19 and made it to the company's board of directors after 10 years. At 32, he was made the managing director of McDonald's Australia. In 2004 he was the first non American to be made the CEO of this America-based food chain. He left the company in May after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer which eventually ended his life in January 2005.
Bell is one amongst the numerous examples of people who have stuck to the same organisation and made it real big. This class stands apart from the rest of the crowd who are on a constant move and for whom change is synonymous with moving high. But is it so? Not in majority of the cases. If you study the successful career stories you will discover that the people who have made it to the top management levels in most of the organisations mostly are employees with a stable career history behind them.
At home in India, MS Banga did his BTech in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1975. From Delhi, he moved to Ahmedabad to study at the Indian Institute of Management . Soon after completing his MBA he joined HLL as a management trainee. He proved his worth and the company rewarded him amply by giving him three out of turn promotions through the late eighties.
He made it to the HLL board of directors at the age of 41.In November 1998, he moved to London for 16 months to work for Unilever UK. Here he learnt about the latest management trends and to familiarised himself with the various parts of the global Lever empire. It was like his grooming ground to make him competent enough to take over as the next chairman of Hindustan Lever. In 2000 he returned to India and took over as the CEO of HLL. A career in the same organisation, starting as a Management trainee and reaching the greatest height by becoming the CEO is an example how stability pays.
Job shifts, done mostly for short-term gains like earning more money and higher designations, can land you in a soup in a couple of years. Constant shifts can allow you to shoot high on these scales but then there is a limit till where you can go - what after that? On the other side, stability in career is still not extinct. There are people who still believe in dedicating their entire work life in same organisation and climbing the corporate ladder at a slow but steady pace.
What goes into the making of a stable employee? There are a number of factors responsible for it:
The right break: Getting that right break is the most essential factor. What exactly do we mean by this? It is that job which does justice to your education and your expectations. Individual tastes count here. For two different people with same educational qualification, the right break may vary. One person may like to work in a smaller organisation where he gets more of initial acclaim while another competent person may like to work in a bigger organisation and work out his way to gain popularity. If a person is able to bag a job in the place of his choice, he stays there. Else his search continues.