Bangalore: Executives are always guided by the notion that moving from company to company will help them to get ahead in their career. But the chances are more to get the promotion if you stay more years with the same company. Monica Hamori, Professor of Human Resource Management at IE Business School in Madrid, however, contradicts the popular notion. She believes that switching employers cannot be a way to reach the top jobs. In a study she has found that it is a career fallacy. The notion that professionals get ahead faster by switching companies is reinforced by career counselors, who advise people to keep a constant eye on outside opportunities. But the data show that footloose executives are not more upwardly mobile than their single-company colleagues. Hamori's analysis of the career histories of 1,001 CEOs who lead the largest corporations in Europe and the U.S. reveals that CEOs have worked, on average, for just three employers during their careers. And although lifetime employment is increasingly rare, a quarter of the CEOs spent an entire career with the same firm. Overall, the more years people stayed with a company, the faster they made it to the top. She has also analyzed the job changes of 14,000 non-CEO executives to compare the outcomes of their inside and outside moves. Inside moves produced a considerably higher percentage and faster pace of promotions. Internal candidates do better because companies know more about them. Promoting an insider poses less risk than hiring somebody from the outside, no matter how extensive the CV or how detailed the reference. Executive search firms, even if they are in the business of shuttling professionals from job to job, show a preference for stability. One U.S. boutique firm specializing in IT evaluates candidates on two axes, stability and "performance and capability indicators." Candidates have to score well on both to be selected for interviews. A consultant at another firm opined that a short stint - less than three years or so - probably wouldn't be sufficient to produce any meaningful contribution to a firm and thus wouldn't do much to demonstrate a candidate's value. Search consultants also tend to interpret frequent moves as a sign of bad decision making, whereas long organizational tenure is rarely seen as reaching a plateau.