Reasons to change a job

Upbeat tidings from the labour market, confirmed by figures published by the Stats office and palpable shortage of workforce in some industries naturally prompt thoughts on what motivates people to change their workplace. Recruitment agencies share results of their research on this; their outcomes and real-life observations put together form a list of factors employees take into account when they are considering a relocation.

1. Your boss. Some statistics prove shattered relationships with a direct manager most often (up to 80% of instances) prompt employees to look for a new job. Your boss may be a tyrant who never puts up with disagreement, a workaholic who coerces their team to work as long and as hard as they do, a tormentor who picks a victim in a team and bullies them. All characters above induce one to quit, but even if your boss is only lazy, incompetent and afraid you may want to take their place, the set-up is bad enough to waste your potential and forbid you to thrive. If you are ordered about by a despot or by an idiot, there is no point in waiting your superior gets sacked. Take matters in your hands before you hit the roof in a bout of frustration!

2. Colleagues. Just like a boss, the closest workmates with whom you spend several hours a day might become a pain the arse. If you simply do not fit in with the team (e.g. you are an extravert surrounded by introverts) the situation is bearable, but if your team lacks team spirit, people run rings around one another or hostility is felt in the air, time to make off!

3. The pay. You can hear voices work is all about the money, yet a decent pay will not compensate you for emotional ordeal that might destroy your psyche if you have to endure it for years. Before you jump to conclusions you are underpaid, do sound out the market to make sure competitors of your employer can offer you more. A huge pressure on salary increases is observed in low-paid professions, however the tide does not lift all boats. Professionals in industries where earnings are above-average and headcount is on decline, such as financial sector, should not reckon on easy pay rise. Moreover, HR departments bend over backwards while grappling with payrolls and their moves vary across the industry. Some companies lay off best-paid experts to find cheaper, yet less competent ones and this might seem economically rational. Many more employers, however, fail to retain (by giving a pay rise) good, yet slightly underpaid employees who quit, but then the same employers hire less experienced new staff and pay them more than their predecessors.

4. Appreciation, or rather lack of it. Hardly any worker will be satisfied with wages paid on time only. Apart from tangible, pecuniary or not, benefits, humans long for other forms of reward. Tapping somebody on their shoulder and saying “good job”, thanking, giving prizes will not replace bonuses but decent bonuses without non-material reward come out shoddy!

5. Prospects. If you feel or are genuinely told in a few years you will be doing the same thing for the same money, then even if your job is not repetitive and you actually like it, your motivation may plummet. Awareness of being stuck in a dead-end street is unappealing, unless you are in a pre-retirement age and wish to make it safely to the moment of pensioning off on your cushy stool.

6. Identity crisis. If you do not believe in a business model of your company, you cannot believe its well-being will translate into yours. The more serious type of the problem is when your employer engages in illegal (or morally dubious) practices you do not wish to take part in.

7. Opportunity. It usually emerges unbidden, for a short moment, so you are given little time to take it or leave it. I would hazard a guess the most successful transfers between jobs come about when an opportunity strikes out of the blue and one is not afraid taking a risk to seize it.

For the very end, a sad observation I need to share. After nearly seven years of being submerged into corporate world, I was under delusion quick advances on the career ladder in international corporations were just thanks to sheer hard graft, while jobs gotten via connections (not in a positive meaning of the word) were the domain of government-owned companies and some of private small businesses. Quite recently I have been disabused…