Time for a change

It takes courage to leave a position. If we know the time is right, however, most of our reluctance to leave can be easily overcome.

This reluctance can take various forms. We are taught to believe that changing jobs too frequently will harm our long-term employment prospects. We might worry about the social relationships we’ve built up in our current place of work. Additionally, there’s an element of apprehension when it comes to finding a new position, or leaving one we’re settled in.

Here, we’ll explore some of the reasons Best Work Podcast guests gave for their reluctance to change positions, and explore why, in search of your best work, most of these can be overcome.

Timing

These days, it’s unusual (though not unheard of) for people to spend their entire careers in a single company. Most of us will change where we work at least once, and for many of us, it will happen several times over.

Changing jobs is therefore more a question of when than if. So the question that someone in work is constantly posing themselves is, 'Is now the right time to change jobs'?

There is, as covered below, a lot of inertia pushing us in the “stay” direction. On almost every day, our answer to the question is “No.” Besides the disincentives of the job-searching process and the experience of joining a new company, there are positive pull factors involved in staying put. You might be close to a big promotion, an annual review, or to qualifying for a sabbatical. You might have a generous salary, pension or holiday allowance in your current position, which you doubt you’d find many equivalent offers for on the market.

Most people, on most days, aren’t job searching. Tipping over against these positive pull factors, and against the friction of finding new work, takes something quite major. This is more often than not an internal, intrinsic sense of misalignment with one or several aspects of our current work.

Engineering Manager Laura has learned to spot these signs relatively early on. Prevention - in the form of recognising disengagement and taking action - is better than curing the consequences of not listening to ourselves in these moments.

VP of Engineering Claire suffered burnout before she was able, retrospectively, to recognise the signs that it was coming. In her case, it wasn’t just overwork that pushed her into burnout, but the frustration of not being involved in key decisions.

Without wanting to over-generalise - every person, company, and situation is distinct and unique - it is usually possible and worthwhile to persevere through tough or challenging periods in a given organisation if our overall alignment to its goals, values and systems is strong enough. There might be a business process that isn’t working well in the short-term, but over the medium-long term this may be a fixable problem.

The skill, which Claire and Laura have learned, is to detect deeper, un-fixable concerns; genuine blockers to performing our best work. That’s when it might be time for a change.

Inertia

It’s not a light decision to take. As Claire points out, there are “overheads” involved in changing position, ranging from the process of finding work itself to the experience of starting work in an unfamiliar environment.

Interestingly, Claire references the learning opportunities that accompany a change of scene as a counterweight to these overheads.

CTO and co-founder Theo majors on the learning curve in his stance on changing jobs frequently.

Many people aren’t as cavalier as Theo. One of the most common concerns around timing a move is the impact it will have on our long-term career prospects. Yes, there are learning opportunities that come with joining a new company, but does frequent role-switching give the wrong impression to future hiring managers?

While a CV littered with 3-6 month stints (for a permanent employee) may give some hiring managers jitters, it’s counter-productive to assume this means we shouldn’t leave any job too soon, regardless of how loosely-aligned we find ourselves after starting, as Head of Product Michelle explains.

In many respects, CTO and co-founder Ben sums the situation up best. He acknowledges the pain points involved in changing companies or vocation, but stresses that leaning into this pain and committing to the move is the most productive approach in the long run.

A balancing act

The decision, at any given moment, over whether or not to seek new work is a complex balancing act between various push and pull factors. The scales tend to tip in favour of staying, but there are ways we can identify factors that will eventually push the balance in the other direction. These factors tend to relate to our alignment and engagement with our current place of work. When it’s high, we can weather most storms; when it’s low, it’s probably best to start looking sooner than later.

At this point, it’s natural to find oneself creating barriers to leaving. Often, as humans, we naturally fear change, and the devil we know seems preferable to the one we don’t. There are, however, counters to most of the arguments for inertia, and in general, when we feel it is time to move on, that gut instinct is usually right.