Questions to ask before you quit your job, from a Harvard fellow and C-suite consultant with 20 years of experience
“What am I not getting on my wish list that I’d really love to get?”
By | Gabriel Cortés | grow.acorns.com
In a sign that the so-called Great Resignation is still going strong, a record 4.43 million people — 3% of the labor force — voluntarily left jobs in September, according to the Labor Department’s most recent data. That broke the record set just a month before, when 4.27 million people quit their jobs.
It’s natural that all that quitting, along with more than a year of pandemic upheaval at work and at home, has some of us contemplating leaving our day jobs for new opportunities, says executive coach Amii Barnard-Bahn. “We’ve had almost 20 months now — most of us, not everyone, but most of us — of being at home, cloistered in our own thoughts,” she says. “That leads to a lot of contemplation.”
In her recent piece in Harvard Business Review titled “5 Reasons Not to Quit Your Job (Yet),” Barnard-Bahn, who’s worked with top brass at FedEx, Adobe, Gap, and Bank of the West, and is a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Coaching, suggests that workers who stay in the current gigs might have just as much opportunity for career advancement as those who leave.
Barnard-Bahn sat down with Grow recently to talk about the article, her Promotability Index Guidebook, and making the most of other people quitting.
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
If there’s a deal-breaker at work, consider ‘your departure plan’
Grow: If someone is currently fantasizing about quitting their job, what’s a good exercise to help them decide?
