Should You Quit Your Job?

Should I stay or should I go? + 7 Tips for Quitting & Job Searching

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.

I am seeing more and more articles about “rage quitting,” “quiet quitting,” and just people quitting their jobs at a higher rate than before.

April 2021 started what became known as the “Great Resignation.” From April through August 2021, over 4 million Americans quit their jobs each month. It dipped in September and October and was back above 4 million in November.

In between all the quitting, there were also layoffs, especially in tech.

According to ComputerWorld, in 2022, “According to TrueUp’s tech layoff tracker, there were 1,405 rounds of layoffs at tech companies globally through the first week of December, affecting 219,959 people.”

And 2023 is set to be even worse! Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce all announced layoffs after giant hiring sprees during the pandemic.

“According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, the online tracker keeping tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 669 tech companies have laid off about 193,098 staff so far this year.”

It is important to explain that many of those layoffs were for non-technical positions, with tons of specialized tech jobs still open, looking for the right people.

Yet, according to one LinkedIn study, and reported by Yahoo!Finance, “Almost 70% of Gen Z and millennial Americans stated they planned to leave their jobs in 2023. And with unemployment at a low 3.5% with many jobs left over, all signs seem to point to this fact: American workers are fed up. Worker dissatisfaction is only part of the story, as inflation has outpaced salaries nationwide.”

With all these layoffs, how are people still so confident and quitting their jobs left and right?

Why do people quit their jobs?

Amy Loomis, a research vice president for IDC’s Future of Work group, collected and analyzed data showing that people who quit their jobs over the past two years did so for these five main reasons:

• They were doing the work of those who left without backfill or training at times.