The more frequently employees change job, the lower salary they can expect compared with their peers, according to a report released on Monday.

Focusing on employees graduating in 2008, 38 percent said they had stayed in their job for more than three years, a third changed jobs once within the period, and 10 percent worked for four or more employers, according to Mycos, an education data consulting and assessment firm.

The report said that an employee who had stayed in the same job for three years after graduation could earn an average monthly income of 5,273 yuan ($830) but one who had worked for five or more employers during the same period could only expect an average 4,461 yuan. "The more employers they have worked for, the lower salary they would get paid," it concluded.

Ping Yi, who had changed jobs five times since her graduation in 2007, now works as a public relations officer with a real estate developer in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan province.

Her first job was as a newspaper reporter, then she worked as an assistant to the manager of a pharmaceutical company, then an English teacher, a Chinese teacher in Thailand, and finally a division chief at a hotel.

She admitted that she had strayed too far from her original target of wanting to work in the cultural industry.

"I would cautiously pick up my next job, then hope I could stay at it longer," she said.

As a result, Ping said she was still not satisfied with her current job and that her monthly salary was 500 to 1,000 yuan less than those of most of her classmates.

According to Feng Lijuan, chief consultant at human resources provider 51job.com, the survey reveals that nearly one in five employees who graduated from college in 2010 had changed jobs at least once within a year after their graduation.

But Feng said salary is not that necessarily connected with job changes.

She gave the example of the fast-developing e-commerce industry, where workers could earn three times their original salary after joining another firm, because some companies are thirsty for new of the best talent.

But she agreed that in the field of foreign trade, for instance, a job change may not bring big salary rises.

"Frequent job changes, for example, three in two years, would make job providers believe that job loyalty wasn't high and so their possibility of getting a big pay raise would be slim," said Feng.

She reckoned working at a company for three years is a decent length of time to learn and accumulate experience, and any job change shorter than that could greatly influence future wages. But some companies say they attach more importance to candidates' skills rather than how many employers they have worked for.

"A candidate's future salary would only relate to whether he or she could be capable of the position we provide," added Wu Kaihang, deputy manager with a Guangzhou-based advertising company.

chenxin1@chinadaily.com.cn