When Elliott Hill stepped out of retirement to take the top job at Nike two years ago, his LinkedIn profile went viral. Not because of what he accomplished, but because of how he got there.
Hill had spent his entire career at one company, starting as a Nike intern in the 1980s and working his way to the CEO seat over 32 years. No other stops, no lateral moves to competitors, and no diversifying across industries. Just one organization, one long arc of contribution, and eventually the corner office. The reason his profile stopped people was the same reason it was remarkable. It almost never happens that way anymore.
A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in April 2026, covered by Fortune — quantified what most executives already suspected. Future CEOs now spend roughly ten more years working outside the companies they eventually lead compared to the year 2000. The average age of a new CEO has risen from 47 in 2000 to 55 in 2023. And corporate boards, according to the research, are now actively prioritizing candidates who have built their expertise across multiple organizations sometimes across unrelated industries entirely.
Company loyalty, the research suggests, may now be a liability for the professional who wants to reach the very top. That is a significant finding and it deserves more than a headline.
What Changed and Why
The shift the NBER research documents didn’t happen arbitrarily. It reflects a specific and deliberate change in how boards evaluate executive candidates, and a corresponding change in what the professional career path actually produces.
Stanford researchers, cited in Fortune’s coverage of the study, pointed out that organizations have become more calculative and future-oriented at an institutional level. The implicit contract that once existed between employers and employees, loyalty rewarded with job security, tenure rewarded with advancement, and dedication rewarded with investment has largely dissolved.
In that environment, professionals who stayed at one organization often did so at a cost they couldn’t fully see at the time. Their expertise deepened in one context, their relationships concentrated in one culture, and their credibility, however strong inside that organization, remained largely untested in the wider professional world. The professionals who moved, by contrast, were forced to do something repeatedly that the research now identifies as the single most valued characteristic in a modern CEO candidate.
They had to build trust from scratch. In new environments, with new colleagues, under new conditions, and they had to do it well enough, and fast enough, that each organization they joined became a meaningful chapter in a career narrative rather than just another line on a résumé. That capability, the ability to enter an unfamiliar organizational environment and establish credibility quickly, is exactly what boards are now paying a premium to find.
The Part of This Research Most Coverage Gets Wrong
The natural takeaway from the Fortune headline is that movement is the strategy. That job-hopping, by virtue of the moves themselves, produces the career outcomes the research describes. That reading is incomplete in a way that matters significantly.
I spent more than twenty years inside global organizations in People and Talent, sitting in the calibration rooms, the succession planning conversations, and the leadership discussions where careers get made and unmade before any public announcement signals that something has shifted. And the pattern I watched most consistently wasn’t about how often someone moved, it was about what they left behind when they did.
The professionals who built genuinely transferable careers, who arrived at every new organization with a reputation that preceded them and relationships that traveled with them, didn’t advance because they collected titles across a résumé. They advanced because at every stop, they built something specific and real.
Colleagues who could speak to their capability from firsthand experience. Leaders who had watched them perform under pressure and would say so, unprompted, to the right person at the right moment. A track record specific enough that it could be described by someone else without the professional having to describe it themselves. That is the career asset the NBER research is actually measuring when it identifies job-hopping as an advantage, not the movement. The accumulated credibility that the movement produced or didn’t.
Two Kinds of Job-Hopping
There are two distinct professional experiences hiding inside the same behavior. The first is the professional who moves frequently and arrives everywhere as a stranger with an impressive title history. Each new organization is a fresh start which sounds appealing until you realize that a fresh start also means starting over. No internal advocates, no colleagues who know what you’re actually like under pressure, and no informal trust already built with the people who shape how you’re perceived and what you’re offered. At each stop, this professional spends the first year building what they could have brought with them. And when they leave, they take only the title.
The second is the professional who moves strategically and arrives at each new organization carrying something invisible and invaluable. Relationships from prior organizations that speak for them before they speak for themselves. A reputation that traveled across company lines because the people who built it with them valued it enough to maintain it. The specific, compounding trust of colleagues who saw them at their best, and their most difficult and chose to remain connected.
At each stop, this professional’s first year looks different because the informal credibility-building that would otherwise take months is already underway before they walk in the door. Both professionals have diverse résumés. The research can measure them the same way, but the organizations that hire them experience them very differently.
What Transfers and What Doesn’t
The NBER study found that boards value generalist expertise developed across multiple organizations. That finding is accurate and important. But the deeper truth, the one I watched determine outcomes in succession planning conversations across two decades, is that what boards are actually selecting for when they choose the job-hopper over the company loyalist isn’t the breadth of their technical experience.
It’s the evidence that this professional can walk into an unfamiliar environment and become effective quickly. That they can build the trust required to lead people who don’t yet know them. That their judgment, their character, and their way of operating in difficult moments has been tested in multiple contexts and held up in all of them. Those things are not built by moving, they are built by how you show up while you’re there.
The professional who job-hops without this, who moves before building anything real, who leaves organizations before the relationships have deepened enough to travel, collects experience in the technical sense without accumulating the specific, transferable human capital that makes that experience worth anything to the next organization.
And the professional who stays at one organization for thirty years, who builds deep trust, deep relationships, and deep institutional credibility in a single context has built something real. The limitation is simply that it hasn’t been tested across contexts. Elliott Hill is the exception. For most professionals, the path that produces transferable leadership credibility now runs through multiple organizations. The question is never how many times you move, it’s what you build at every stop.
The Loyalty That Actually Matters
Stanford researchers noted that companies have become less likely to reward effort and loyalty if doing so doesn’t figure into their growth plan. That observation is accurate, and the implication most professionals draw from it is that loyalty itself has become an outdated value. I’d like to offer a different interpretation however.
As the loyalty that the corporate contract used to reward, loyalty to the organization, to the tenure, to the expectation that staying would be reciprocated, was always the weaker version of a more important commitment. The stronger version is loyalty to the standard of who you are in the work.
To the quality of contribution you bring regardless of whether the organization is watching. To the consistency of character that makes colleagues from a prior organization mention your name years after you’ve left. To the relationships you invest in not because they serve an immediate strategic purpose, but because the people are worth knowing and the connection is worth maintaining.
That loyalty doesn’t belong to any single organization, it belongs to the professional who practices it. And unlike the institutional loyalty the research describes as increasingly unrewarded, this version travels. It is the specific thing that turns a job-hopping résumé into a career that boards recognize as exceptional. And it is available to every professional who decides to build it deliberately, whether they stay at one organization for thirty years or move every three.
About Isaac Adesugba
Isaac is a Southern California-based Global People & Talent Management Executive, author of The Ultimate Impression (available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on Amazon), and Corporate Readiness speaker. He works with professionals, universities, and organizations on the trust and credibility disciplines that determine career trajectory before any formal evaluation process begins.
First 90 Coach, his free AI coaching tool built on these frameworks, is now rebranding to The Impression Advantage Coach — available on the OpenAI GPT Store.
The Impression Advantage Workshop — a half or full-day engagement for new hire cohorts, newly promoted managers, and organizations navigating transition is also available. Request a proposal at careeradvicebyisaac.com.
