It feels like everyone’s doing it.
More than 7.5 million workers quit their jobs in April and May, up from 4.3 million during the same period the year before. Everyone’s talking about fresh starts. Burnout, the return-to-office mandate, boredom after a year of career stagnation: They can all seem like good enough reasons to send that farewell email.
But is leaving your job right now the right call? How do you make a decision you won’t regret?
More than a third of workers are looking for a new job, according to a May survey of 1,021 Americans from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Anthony Klotz, a management professor at Texas A&M University who studies resignations, says “turnover shocks”—being passed over for a promotion, watching a close colleague resign—often spark an employee’s desire to leave.
In these times, we’ve all basically experienced a turnover shock, he says. “So much change has happened over the last year that in some way or another we’ve thought, ‘Is this what I want to keep doing, in my life and my job?’”
