Is "The Great Resignation" Fueling a Rebirth of Vocation?

According to CNBC.com reporting, nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in January of 2022. With almost 48 million people quitting in 2021, per CNBC’s reporting of annual federal data.

Based upon CNBC’s reporting of Willis Towers Watson’s 2022 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey, 44% of employees are “job seekers,”. Of them, 33% are active job hunters who looked for new work in the fourth quarter of 2021, and 11% planned to look in the first quarter of 2022.

In a piece by Ian Cook published to the Harvard Business Review, when addressing the question of who is driving the great resignation, it appears resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees, specifically those between 30 and 45 years of age. Cook also reported that while turnover is typically highest among younger employees their study found an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021 among mid-career employees aged 30 to 45 years of age. While resignations decreased for workers in the 20 to 25 age range. Adding another interesting data point, Cook reported resignation rates also fell for those in the 60 to 70 age group.

While much of the analysis of what continues to drive the “great resignation” is centered around remote work opportunities, relocations, and income. As a life, career and leadership coach working with clients in the mid-career workforce demographic, what I hear from clients sparks much deeper than simply income and preferences for remote work opportunities.

When I speak with coaching clients who are either unemployed or newly self-employed and looking for opportunities or those struggling to make the decision to resign, what I hear starts with a desire to do something different.

Consistently, across sectors, my coaching conversations with mid-career job seekers and budding entrepreneurs lands their decision making around three core elements.

Desire. Inspiration. And Choice.

Yes, income is always a core factor in an increasingly expensive world. And in our new era of global chronic health crisis, limiting exposure is also a new variable all must consider.

Placing those variables as a new universal standard for all job seekers, the desire to do something different bolstered by inspiration to make a difference or use one’s experience and knowledge in a new way are core factors that are driving decisions to resign and reinvent.

And ultimately having the ability to make the choice to follow your desire and harness one’s inspiration is a formula for personal professional freedom as well as core signals of a return to a vocational driven workforce.

The shift from the usual professional flow and ways of doing business, brought on by COVID-19, not only disrupted business, and commerce systems, but it also disrupted the mental and emotional lens through which many see their career and employment. It created a landscape where many, especially those who are closer to the middle of their peek career performance, began to reevaluate and reassess what and why they do what it is they do as employment. Leaving many asking the question, “if my core motivation for doing what I do is simply financial survival, are their other mechanisms and opportunities to secure financial sustainability that give me more choice, inspires me and is more in line with my desires?”.

This shift signals a values-based change from income as the primary motivation for employment to purpose, which is the foundation of a vocational driven workforce. When we think of vocation, we usually limit it to building trades or manual service-related professions. But at the heart of vocation is a feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation along with a high sense of worthiness and dedication.

Vocation

definition -

1. a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.
2. a person's employment or main occupation, especially regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication.
3. a trade or profession.

Along with increased income and lessened health exposure, mid-career job seekers, especially, are looking to do work that fuels the inspiration behind why they desire to do the work they do, and they want more choice in how they do what it is they do.

When working with clients seeking to make a career transition the first three questions I ask are:

1. What is it that you truly desire to do?
2. What is inspiring your desire?
3. What choices are you willing to make?

In addition to strategy planning around remote work opportunities, compensation, and work to life balance benefits, innovation driven employers must also ask their workforce these core questions.

Before you let talent walk out the door with your institutional knowledge, have the conversation about what it is those employees are now desiring to do and what has inspired their desire. 

From there you open the landscape to co-create what choice and opportunity looks like that will very likely save you money and time, along with your institutional knowledge.

Employers must also re-tool and reinvent the way they engage with their workforce and it’s better and cheaper to do it with the teams you have than re-tooling and re-inventing while rebuilding from scratch.

Ask the three questions

1. What is it you desire to do here?
2. What about your experience has inspired that desire?
3. What choices do you and we need to make to make that possible?

And if they ultimately still choose to resign, at least they leave having been asked and heard and you have more real person knowledge to drive your reinvention.