‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect

>>a whopping 95% of workers are now considering changing jobs, and 92% are even willing to switch industries to find the right position, according to a recent report by jobs site Monster.com.

This seems very high to me and little suspect, what is even more suspect is that they didn't link the report.

I have seen a few of these articles, but no good report that tracks this over time and all the articles dismiss or omit the possibility that more people are quitting because there is build from the past year and half where people were afraid to switch jobs. I think this is most likely.

It could be true, if asked, a lot of people will be like : yeah yeah, sure i will change jobs! Any moment now!

Did you apply?

No no

Do you plan to?

Any day now!

I think there's going to be a bit of a disconnect between worker retention and new hiring. Companies are going to want existing workers to go back to the office. Yes I think most will accommodate an increased proportion of working from home, but they're going to want to hold the line that if they want you in the office they have the right to insist.

On the other hand when they're hiring new workers they're going to have to face up to the fact that a lot of workers are going to want to work from home, or do so for a substantial part of their working time. They're going to need to meet that expectation to be competitive for talent.

It's not as if 95% of workers are going to be able to just walk into 100% wfh roles. The roughly 95% of companies these workers currently work for are also the ones hiring people.

So this is going to take a while to work itself out as each company or worker figures out their best way to navigate through this transition, but the transition is going to happen.

I think from a fanicial perspective this is because salaried (or salary like) positions are sort of illiquid. Kind of like houses, moving is a pain so people often do not want to sell unless the profit is significant.

Here's a blog post outlining why I left Google this month (June 2021) to take a 1-year sabbatical: https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue/

(Per AnIdiotOnTheNet's feedback here is a summary of my motivations and a compare/contrast with the ideas mentioned in the CNBC post) The main thing for me was the prospect of having kids in the next 5 years. It doesn't seem like it will ever get easier to have a sabbatical than it is right now. It helped me to think of the decision as a tradeoff between money, energy, and time. When you have a full-time job you optimize for money and sacrifice your energy and time. Taking a sabbatical means that I'm choosing to sacrifice money in order for more energy and time. Maybe this is helpful way to think about burnout: burnout is sacrificing too much time and energy for money. Not wanting to commute any longer was a secondary decision but not my primary concern. The article states “Either they’re unfulfilled from their jobs or their priorities have changed", I would say both of those were relevant in my experience. Last this article is suggesting that people are resigning because they have better opportunities elsewhere. I do worry that I'm taking this sabbatical as a terrible time. It could be a great time to switch jobs and lock in a full-remote position. I think there are two general groups of people participating in this potential "great resignation": sabbatical / gap year people like me who are doing it from a "life is short" philosophy and others who are doing it to land a better job. The motivations to resign are probably very different depending on what group you're in.

Edit: Someone left an angry comment (deleted a few seconds ago) stating that I keep linking to this post and it seems like I'm doing it as a bot. I will note here that I'm not a bot and I'm sorry if my comments are coming off as robotic, but I put a tremendous amount of effort into that blog post and I'm just trying to share my perspective without spending a lot of time on one-off comments. The fact that this conversation is coming up so frequently on page #1 shows that a lot of people are thinking about it. And because I actually took the leap I figure that my post is a good "skin in the game" anecdotal explanation of why one person actually participated in this "great resignation". (Edit 2: I put in a summary of my blog post and a compare/contrast of my motivations with the CNBC article's content so this last paragraph is now obsolete)