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2015-04-08 05:19:02
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
April 7, 2015
Regardless of your age, background, or accomplishments, you have probably
fantasized about the possibility of a new career at some point in your life
those who haven t are the exception.
LinkedIn reports that of its 313 million members, 25% are active job seekers,
while 60% can be considered passive job seekers people who are not
proactively searching for a new job, but seriously willing to consider
opportunities. In addition, there has been a steady increase of self-employed
and temporary workers over the past two decades. This is true even in rich
economies with low unemployment rates, like the U.S. and the U.K., partly
because of the glamorization of entrepreneurship, the rise of the sharing
economy, and the ubiquity of incompetent management, which makes the prospect
of not having a boss rather alluring.
Yet at the same time, humans are naturally prewired to fear and avoid change,
even when we are decidedly unhappy with our current situation. Indeed,
meta-analyses show that people often stay on the job despite having negative
job attitudes, low engagement, and failing to identify with the organization s
culture. And, since career changes are often driven by emotional rather than
rational factors, they often end up disappointing. So at the end of the day,
there is something comforting about the predictability of life: it makes us
feel safe. As the Danish philosopher S ren Kierkegaard observed: Anxiety is
the dizziness of freedom.
The inability to make a decision is in itself anxiety-provoking, because it
increases uncertainty about the future. In addition, most people, even
millennials, value long-term job stability, not just in themselves but also in
others. Unsurprisingly, the OECD sees job security as a key component of
quality of life, while academic studies report that job insecurity is a major
cause of psychological stress.
All this explains why it is so hard to leave a job, no matter how uninspiring
or monotonous it may be. In order to help you decide whether it may be time for
a career change, here are five critical signs, based on psychological research,
that you would probably benefit from a career switch:
You are not learning. Studies have shown that the happiest progression to late
adulthood and old age involves work that stimulates the mind into continuous
learning. This is particularly important if you are high on Openness to
Experience/Inquisitiveness, a personality trait associated with curiosity,
creativity, love of learning, and having a hungry mind.
You are underperforming. If you are stagnated, cruising in autopilot, and could
do your job while asleep, then you re almost certainly underperforming. Sooner
or later, this will harm your resume and employability. If you want to be happy
and engaged at work you are better off finding a job that entices you to
perform at your highest level.
You feel undervalued. Even when employees are happy with their pay and
promotion prospects, they will not enjoy their work unless they feel
appreciated, especially by their managers. Furthermore, people who feel
undervalued at work are more likely to burnout and engage in counterproductive
work behaviors, such as absenteeism, theft, and sabotage. And when the employee
in question is a leader, the stakes are much higher for everyone else because
of their propensity to behave in ways that could destroy the organization.
You are just doing it for the money. Although people tend to put up with
unrewarding jobs mostly for financial reasons, staying on a job just for the
money is unrewarding at best, and demotivating at worst. As I pointed out in a
previous post, employee engagement is three times more dependent on intrinsic
than extrinsic rewards, and financial rewards extinguish intrinsic goals (e.g.,
enjoyment, sheer curiosity, learning or personal challenge).
You hate your boss. As the saying goes, people join companies but they quit
their bosses. This implies that there is a great deal of overlap between
employees who dislike their jobs, and those who dislike their bosses. In our
research, we find that 75% of working adults find that the most stressful part
of their job is their immediate supervisor or direct line manager. Until
organizations do a better job at selecting and developing leaders, employees
will have to lower their expectations about management or keep searching for
exceptional bosses.
Of course, these are not the only signs that you should pay attention to. There
are many other valid reasons for considering a job switch, such as work-life
balance conflicts, economic pressures, firm downsizing, and geographical
relocation. But these reasons are more contextual than psychological, and
somewhat less voluntary. They are therefore less likely to lead to decision
uncertainty than the five reasons I listed.
At the end of the day, real-world problems tend to lack a clear-cut solution.
Instead, the correct answer depends on its consequences and how pleased we are
with the outcome, and both are hard to predict. As Abraham Lincoln said, the
best way to predict the future is to create it, so the only way to know
whether a career move is actually right for you is to make it.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority on personality profiling,
talent management, and people analytics. He is the CEO of Hogan Assessment
Systems and a Professor of Business Psychology at University College London
(UCL) and Columbia University.