EDITOR’S NOTE: Our August 3rd post asked the project and programme management community to weigh in on the matter of candidate unrest with their working status. Specifically: Why Do People Quit Their Job To Find Another? Most of the responses we received have been formulated into our Tipoffs article due out with the August issue, in inboxes Thursday. New subscribers can sign up here for free issues. In the meantime, Pawel Brodzinski gives his full, unabridged view on the question.
Generally there are two groups of factors we consider when assessing our jobs: things which are mandatory requirement and those which are nice-to-haves.
The former is usually easier to describe although it would vary among different roles and different people. Usually basic salary goes into this group. If we were paid less than that, we wouldn’t take the job.
The more interesting group is the latter. These are our exciters. Great atmosphere, place to grow along with the company, flexibility, a bunch of additional bonuses and many more would usually suit here.
Let’s consider for this argument that people are generally happy with their current jobs. What changes over time that they get motivation to look for another job? A few things are possible:
- Some of nice-to-haves become mandatory requirements. Typically it would be an option to get promoted or move to another, more interesting, position as we get more experienced. If I want to move to other position but my current company offers me no choice I look for another job. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be about promotion to management.
- We become tired of the current role. If it’s not directly about changing the role it’s usually about burnout. We don’t want to work on the same project we have worked for the last five years or we want to learn new technology or something like that. If the organization doesn’t provide any options to achieve that we start considering a different job.
- Money. Despite what we use to say we can be bought simply for more money. How much more? It is an individual thing but majority of us have a price tag attached. Paying that price will make us to change the job even if we are happy with the current one and don’t actively look for another. Head hunters often use this path to take over specialist for their clients.
- Our job sucks. As we work we learn about the organization and realize how many things we don’t like about it. We learn that the company doesn’t really fulfill every point on our mandatory requirement list. It appears our boss suck or the organization is totally formalized or we have virtually no freedom. This process of learning the company can last long time, especially if we get promoted along the way thus get access to new levels of knowledge.
I think one more thing is worth stressing. We rarely change the job just to get more excited, as long as nothing important frustrates us. Even more, as many people prefer to play safe even if we get frustrated just a bit, it is rarely an impulse to look for another job. We have to overcome our natural fear of losing safety first so we usually need much negative motivation to make a move.
Pawel Brodzinski is a seasoned manager working in software industry. He is passionate about leading great teams, fixing broken projects and creating high-quality software and these are topics covered by his blog Software Project Management. You can also follow Pawel on Twitter.
