When to Quit Your Job
A lot of us have considered quitting our jobs. However, because of the risk to our financial security involved, quitting a job is a potentially dangerous thing to do. However, there are a number of things that can provide you with a sign that it is time for you to move on to another job or to start your own business.
Lack of Advancement/Raises
The best reason to quit a job is when you’ve become more valuable as a worker than your employer is willing to pay or reward. Many of us spend our time working on our resumes, developing new skills so that we will be more valuable workers. However, not every workplace has sufficient positions or money to reward those skills once we attain them. As a result, we will often find ourselves in a position where we aren’t having our most valuable skills utilized with no real prospect of that ever changing.
One should only quit a job for this reason, though, when one’s skills are marketable. Often, we will have developed skills that mean that we will be rapidly “snapped up” if we put ourselves on the labor market again. If this isn’t the case, quitting a job may not lead to better pay or opportunities, but worse ones.
Workplace Abuse
At other times, it makes sense to quit a job because of an abusive employer. Employers who constantly insult, yell or even criticize can make the lives of their employees miserable. In these cases, the abuse can make our entire lives miserable, and even if there are no immediately available options, it is worth taking a financial hit so as not to suffer psychological harm. As John Turturro’s character says in Do the Right Thing, “If you hate your job, you hate your life.”
Before quitting, however, you should see if you have any other options available. Check with human resources about the possibility of a transfer or even to lodge a complaint against an abusive employer (be warned, though, that unless you can make the complaint stick, a complaint can make things worse). You can also speak to your union if you have one about the abuse. Finally, purchase the book called “Bullies, Tyrants and Impossible People” for some strategies for dealing with abusive bosses before you quit.
