When to quit
One of the most shared nerd processors of all time was called "How to quit." In it, I argue that there are better and worse ways to quit, and that it's worth it to put in the effort to quit the right way.
This is all well and good, once you've decided to quit. The harder question for many of us is when it's time to go.
This is the first of three installments in a mega-data-story about quitting. This series is for you if:
- You're thinking about quitting your job
- You've ever quit and been delighted
- You've ever quit and regretted it
- You've ever rage-quit or quiet-quit
- You've ever wanted to quit but didn't
Let's dive in. When should you quit?
Let's check in with some famous quitters
For most people, the media isn't tracking their every career move. But some people get spectacular attention when they leave a job, either because they're independently well-known or because they quit spectacularly.
For this installment, I looked at 150 executives who have quit their jobs in the last 24 months. I focused on execs who offered a meaningful public statement explaining their decision to move on. I also picked those who, by all appearances (company growth, their own career trajectory, etc), left of their own accord. This is not a perfect predictor of quitting vs. termination, but, based on a sampling of the leaders that I know personally, it's a decent proxy.
A couple of years ago, I started tracking these statements when I saw them published on LinkedIn. Not exactly peer-reviewed research, but directionally interesting.
Celebrities, they're just like us (but are they really?)
Most people have a new job lined up before quitting. After all, that mortgage doesn't pay for itself. So I was struck by how few execs in this data set quit without knowing their next move.
After excluding the exes who retired when they quit, more than a third of the group had not yet announced a new role 6+ months after quitting.
There are many reasons that execs are more likely than others to quit without having their next role lined up. There aren't many exec roles and the hiring processes can take months, so execs tend to have longer gaps between roles. They also tend to have the resources to support longer breaks between jobs. But I was still surprised by how many people left one job without having any idea what the next one would be.
The next job isn't always linear
14 execs announced their retirement when they quit. Putting them aside, as of the time of this writing, 96 of the remaining execs have started a new role. That leaves 40 who have not yet done so, at least not publicly.
Among those who have announced their next role, I was interested in how many were making lateral moves (same basic job as before), how many were advancing (bigger title in the same function), and how many were doing something quite different. The distribution surprised me.
Only 16% of the execs advanced when they moved, which is lower than I was expecting. Most strikingly, 25% of the group moved on to work that is substantially different from the role they left behind: a few founded companies, some changed disciplines, and many made bigger industry shifts.
In other words, for many of these execs, quitting their jobs ushered in a completely new era.
When is the right time?
I also wanted to understand what separated the leaders moving into lateral roles from those earning promotions after quitting.
I removed the execs who made a career change and plotted out the remaining execs by their tenure in the role they quit. I then mapped out whether their next role was a lateral move, a promotion, or a demotion.
Among these executives, there is a clear sweet spot for tenure: people staying in role between 3-5 years are more likely to get a promotion after quitting than people with shorter or longer tenures.
People with tenures of 10+ years are the least likely to get promoted after quitting. Even the execs who stayed in role less than a year were more likely to get promoted after quitting.
The bottom line: For those sticking with the same line of work, staying in their prior role 3-5 years is most likely to earn them a promotion in their next job. This makes sense. But for much of the group, the path after quitting is not that linear.
35% of these execs are taking long breaks between jobs. For those that have taken a new role, 25% of of them have made significant career changes. That's a lot of people stepping off the career treadmill, not even including the ones who retired.
Up next week, Episode 2: Rage-quitting, quiet-quitting, and giving notice. Subscribe here if you're not already!
Kieran
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