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Why The Economy Isn’t the Boss of You

December 22, 2008 | Author: Jessica Howard | Filed under: Career Change, Job Hunting, Layoffs, Moving Up, Setting Goals

You’d love to make the move to a different company You know they’ve got a better job and you’ve got the skills. But what if it’s “last one hired, first one fired”?

Wayyy too risky, right?

Guess you’ll just have to head back to your cubicle and wait for the economy to give you permission to think about your career.

In a recent UpMo post titled Your Career is an Asset: Don’t Let it Depreciate, we talked about the idea that when the economy goes downhill, professionals tend to hunker down and neglect career development. It’s about keeping a job, any job, rather than keeping an eye on goals.

Then, we came across a CNN article that backs that idea up with some powerful statistics and quotes. Here is an excerpt from the story:

Job hopping, a widely accepted way to get ahead, has gone by the wayside as workers fear making moves will make them more vulnerable to layoffs.

But in today’s market, turnover is slowing to a standstill. For the past three months, the quits rate, which serves as a barometer of workers’ ability to change jobs, has remained at 1.6%, a near four-year low. The rate, a measure of the number of quits during the month as a percent of total employment, declined significantly across industries, including manufacturing, retail and finance, the BLS said. Only the mining industry has seen the rate rise significantly.

Under normal conditions, workers average more than 10 different jobs by age 42, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and use each move to build a career, network and skill set.

“When times are bad, people don’t quit,” said Robert Brusca, chief economist at Fact and Opinion Economics.

Some more take-home points from the story:

  • “About 62% of workers surveyed by TheLadders.com, a job search site, said they were not likely to achieve their career goals at their current company.”
  • “A whopping 96% of them said they were likely to achieve their career goals at another company — although nearly 37% said they would not relocate for another job opportunity.”
  • “‘Talent mobility is frozen in the market place,’ said David Smith, managing director of Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance practice in North America. And that’s not because the opportunities aren’t there but because workers are afraid to take them.”

Fear is rarely a good decision maker. Something to think about.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 and is filed under Career Change, Job Hunting, Layoffs, Moving Up, Setting Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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