When Should You Leave Your First Agency?
The advice on when to leave a first agency circulates every year and is always the same number. Stay two years, then move. It is repeated confidently enough that people treat it as a finding rather than a convention, and it has very little to do with whether a particular person should go.
Two years is a CV heuristic. It describes how a recruiter reads a document, not how a career is built.
A better test than a date at your first agency
The question worth asking is whether the work still produces situations you have not been in before. A first agency is valuable for exactly as long as it keeps generating unfamiliar problems: a client who behaves differently, a format nobody has cracked, a brief that fails for a new reason.
When the problems start repeating, the learning has stopped, and the time left on the clock is irrelevant. That can happen at fourteen months or at five years, and both are legitimate.
Leave when the problems start repeating, not when the calendar reaches a number somebody else chose.
What people underestimate about staying
The thing a long first stint gives you is the second half of projects. Juniors who move quickly accumulate launches and almost never see what happened eighteen months later, which is where most of the actual lessons are stored.
Deloitte India's 2025 survey, covering Indian respondents, found 94% valuing hands-on learning. Hands-on is not only the making. It is being present when the thing you made turns out to have been wrong.
What people underestimate about going
Equally, a first agency teaches one house's way of working as though it were the way of working. Everyone who has moved describes the same jolt of realising that a process they assumed was universal was simply local.
There is no correct number. There is only the honest answer to whether the last six months taught you anything, and most people already know it before they ask.
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