Before You Quit: Do You Really Need a New Job?

Not every feeling of dissatisfaction means "quit." Before making a major career move, first check whether the problem lies in the job itself, the way the job is designed, the company, the profession or something else. And if you do decide to leave, do it in a way that doesn't destroy the value you've built.

Do You Really Need to Leave?

The highest number of people leave companies at the end of the year, as shown by LinkedIn Economic Graph study on Labor Market Seasonality while the peak of job applications runs from January to May. However, what culminates in quitting or entering the application process doesn't happen overnight.

Returning from summer holidays, many people realize it wasn't just exhaustion. The job dissatisfaction they felt before summer is still there, and that's when thoughts of leaving start to take root.

People often get stuck in indecision here, wondering how dissatisfied they truly are or how much dissatisfaction is "enough" to make quitting the smartest move. Especially during times of uncertainty, social changes, or other crises, people tend to stay in their current roles until they get a clearer picture of the landscape.

If you are in a dilemma about whether you want to stay or leave, feeling like you don't even know what you want, an interesting (though insufficient!) quick litmus test is to flip a coin. Assign "Heads – I stay" and "Tails – I leave." The moment the coin lands and reveals a side, you will instantly know whether that was what you actually wanted, bringing your emotional reaction to that imagined outcome into awareness. The coin doesn't make the decision for you, and which side it lands on doesn't matter; what matters is what you felt when you saw the result.

Naturally, this is just one dimension. Other dimensions to examine before making a decision involve your broader context, a rational assessment of your financial and career situation, the market, and so on.

Is a New Job Really Better?

If you think, "I have a bad job, I need to quit right now!", this might be a dysfunctional belief, one that hinders more than it helps. In Designing Your Life (DYL) career coaching approach that utilizes the ideas, principles, and tools of design thinking, we start with a reframe of the "bad job" problem: There are no bad jobs, only jobs that don't fit me right now, and perhaps I can redesign my job so that it fits better and becomes a "good" job for me.

So, first try fixing what you dislike in your current job, because experience shows that the grass often isn't greener on the other side. While we are interviewing with a new company, we tend to compare the reality of our current job with an idealized version of a potential job (which, unfortunately, is sometimes presented to candidates instead of a realistic job preview). The issue isn't just that candidates idealize the new role, but also that during selection they rarely have enough information to make a truly realistic assessment.

Research titled Is the grass greener on the other side? A longitudinal study of the impact of employer change and occupational change on job satisfaction shows that while there is evidence of adaptation of job satisfaction after some dissatisfaction occurs when it is a job change within your occupation, those who change employers across occupations experience a steady decline of intrinsic job satisfaction that continues for at least six years(!) after the transition. Therefore, this kind of decision, especially if you are thinking about changing occupations at the same time, must be well thought through.

A good way to start making a well-thought-through change is journaling - writing down for a few weeks what bothered you at work that day. You will likely spot patterns and recurring issues, eventually gaining a better understanding of how to address them.

Before changing jobs, ask yourself what exactly you are trying to change. Instead of resigning, try redesigning your current job. Propose to your manager joining a new project if you want to develop new skills, ask to step back from certain tasks, or find a way to automate part of your workflow yourself. Sometimes, people experience a bigger leap in job satisfaction by removing certain aspects (changing managers, stepping off a grueling project) than by adding new ones (taking on a new, exciting project). Adjusting just a few elements of your current role might bring more fulfillment than an entire company or career shift.

If You Do Leave, How Should You Leave?

However, if you feel that all strategies and opportunities for redesigning your current job have been exhausted and you decide to quit, here are strategies for a "generative" quitting, recommended by the Designing Your Life (DYL) career coaching approach, leaving in a way that creates a positive impact and opens good future opportunities for both you and those around you.

Before you quit, try to find or build a new job. Employers respond more frequently, invite candidates to interview more often, and extend offers more readily to currently employed professionals than to unemployed ones. It might not feel fair, but the accumulated experience of candidates and HR professionals reflect this reality. (Still, sometimes nothing is worth staying and enduring toxicity.)

After you resign: Leave the park in better shape than you found it.

Some common ways people quit are as a half-present Ghost in the notice period or a bridge burner. The third way is generative.

Some people quit and act like a half-present Ghost. They are barely there, avoiding talking about their reasons for leaving while dropping subtle, passive-aggressive hints about their grievances, saying goodbye to a few people while most colleagues barely notice when they actually departed.

The second typical option resembles an old commercial where a hairdresser, serving a constantly nagging client, realizes she won the lottery, cuts off a huge chunk of the client's hair, and skips happily out of the salon. While people sometimes feel bitter enough to want to burn all bridges, blast an email to everyone, venting everything that's been weighing on them, doing so rarely leads to constructive change (if ever) and is usually harmful to the person leaving.

A better option is:

1. Ask for feedback on your work. You will learn from it, even if you don't fully agree with it.

   
   

2. Do something good for the people staying behind. For colleagues whose work you appreciated, tell their leaders how great it was working with them and what you valued; if you leave without saying it, those contributions might go unnoticed.

   
   

3. Help whoever succeeds you in your role. Create a handover document explaining where things are, providing links, and outlining process nuances learned only through experience, so they don't have to learn the hard lessons you went through.

   
   

4. Strengthen connections with colleagues who matter to you and will remain part of your network. You can support each other in the future (exchanging recommendations from this job, or simply staying in touch). Invite them for coffee or lunch, discuss the future, and agree on when you'll reconnect.

   
   

5. Write a brief farewell message to share with colleagues once your resignation is public. Be sure to include something positive about your new opportunity, something positive about your current role, reflect on valuable lessons or projects you worked on together and something positive about the people you are leaving behind. Express genuine gratitude to the team in your own words, avoiding copy-paste cliche.

   
   

If you want to gain clarity on where you are right now and design your next move with intention, explore how Designing Your Life (DYL) Career Coaching can guide you.

To discuss your situation and see if we’re a good fit to work together, feel free to book a free Discovery Call.