My husband has worked up the ladder, ten years after leaving the Navy. He has worked for four different employers. With each job move, he found a better position in which to use his skills and better benefits. He works for himself, in a sense. He keeps his eye on the prize and makes it to that goal by action... not sitting still in one place. It just isn’t in his nature to wait for a raise that won’t be there. In ten years he has increased his pay by about $30,000. He is pleased with his progress.
Sincerely, good for you both. My situation was much different but I don’t want to leave tear stains on the forum so I won’t go into that. :-)
I will say that it would have been much easier to leave my job if not for the fact of sacrificing benefits like the pension. In fact, I believe the job would have been much better if they’d known that people like me could leave. As it was, they knew that, after some number of years on the job, their employees were mostly ‘trapped’ employees. They played a statistical game of employee retention.