The TL; DR;
People change jobs probably a lot more often than you think. So, if you are looking for a new position for any reason, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Well, not unless the reason is that you sexually harassed your coworkers and got fired. You should feel bad about that. Now, read the rest of this post, like, seriously, what were you going to do that was so important in the next five minutes.
Things are going well at 7 Generation Games right now. It’s one of those rare times when everything is on or ahead of schedule and I had time to get to some items on my endless to-do lists. One of those was to go through the email lists we had accumulated over the last 10 years. As an experiment, I decided to send out emails from my personal account, just to see how many bounced back and whether the reason for that bounce was the person had moved on or the organization no longer existed.
The average American changes jobs about once every 3 years, but not really.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American has about 13 different jobs from age 18 to 58. About five of those jobs were from 18 to 24. So, from 24-58, most people will have 8 jobs, changing jobs a little less than once every four years.
There are a lot of layoffs happening right now, in the tech industry, in government. For some reason, and don’t ask me why, whenever I have left a job, I felt a sense of failure, even when I was leaving to go somewhere for a lot more money. And, although I have never been laid off or fired, if I’m honest, I have to admit there were certainly positions that were not a good fit and when I left both my former employer and I heaved a sigh of relief.
So, what did I find out?
About 30% of the emails we had collected from 3 to 8 years ago bounced back as invalid. Interestingly, for about a third of those that bounced back, the ORGANIZATION no longer existed. The startup, charter school or non-profit organization domain name was invalid. We work with a lot of public school districts, which aren’t very likely to close, and when teachers or administrators move within a district, they usually keep their same email, so I think this is an UNDERESTIMATE of the amount of job changes.
Where did those people go? I know some continued in their same careers, because they showed up on more recent mailing lists in another school district or neighboring state. A few, I knew personally, and they had happily retired or (presumably unhappily) died. Why did the rest of them move on? I have no idea.
I was surprised by these results, having always assumed that everyone but me got a job out of graduate school and stayed at that job until they retired – until I got these results and got motivated to look up the actual statistics.
If your business fails, are you a failure?
One reason I believe that many people feel bad when they leave a job – because their organization failed or because their position was eliminated, is because they feel they are letting people down. They’re worried their family and friends will think less of them.
There was not a person on those lists that I thought less of because they were no longer in their previous job. The ones I knew well, I admired as good teachers, entrepreneurs or administrators. I remembered conversations we’d had at conferences or training that I had done.
Some people, I knew, left their jobs to found a startup and the startup failed and they went back to teaching or selling hardware. Others, quit to go back to graduate school and so are now doing the ramen-for-dinner graduate student life. And some of the most brilliant people I know got caught up in all of the government layoffs.
Let me be clear here, I am not at all downplaying the stress of not knowing how you are going to pay the mortgage if you are unemployed or how to to pay your kid’s tuition on a reduced salary. The struggle is real.
99 Problems but Your Loved Ones’ Opinions is Not One
Decades ago, my father-in-law decided he wanted to quit working for a big company and open his own radio and TV repair shop. It failed and the family had to live with his wife’s parents while they saved up enough to get back in their own home. It’s a situation some people I know are in now. Yet, my husband got his interest in electronics from his father and that has evolved into a long and successful career as a software developer.
After his father’s death, when my mother-in-law asked Dennis if there was anything he wanted from the house, the only thing he asked for was the sign that used to hang outside the shop. When he brought it home, our young daughter looked at it and said, “Grandpa had a business? Cool!”
As Father Mike reminds people, “In the Bible it says, ‘It came to pass.’ not ‘It came to stay.’”
The people who love and admire you will continue to do so, whatever your employment situation. Good luck in the new job.
