What’s The Best Way For A Manager To Switch Jobs?

You may be willing to switch to a new company, but do you know how to do it correctly?
You may be willing to switch to a new company, but do you know how to do it correctly?
Image Credit: Alexis Martín

No job that any of us have will probably last us for our entire career. What that means is that we’re all going to be packing up our manager skills and switching jobs at some point in time. This is where things can get a bit tricky because none of us have had any manager training in how to do this correctly. Yes, we may be willing to jump to a new company to take on that shiny new job. However, we need to realize that there are a whole bunch of ways that that a job switch could go wrong. What’s the best way to change jobs?

It’s All About How You Go About Doing It

The people who study how managers switch jobs have come up with an interesting observation. What they have discovered is that millennials have been changing jobs 3x more often then their work colleagues. Where things start to get even more interesting is that this level of churn may be accelerating as we move forward. Right now the labor market is quite tight. At the same time, most companies are offering meager pay increases. The result of these factors is that 43% of young workers are poised to quit their jobs within the next two years. This is an increase from 38% last year.

If you find yourself in this crowd, then you are going to have to be careful. When you go looking for your next job, you are going to want to do it discreetly. While you are looking, you are not going to want to damage your relationship with your current employer. A lot of us use LinkedIn to go searching for our next job. What we may not realize is that depending on what our privacy settings are, your LinkedIn network may receive notifications when you connect with a recruiter and people at the company that you are going to. Clearly, this can cause you to have a very awkward situation on your hands.

In order to find your next job online, you are going to have to post your resume online. This can cause you some problems. If your current employer goes looking for a candidate with your set of skills, you may show up. Hopefully it goes without saying that when you are looking for a job you should refrain from using your current employer’s email, phone, or computer to perform your job search. You do realize that some workplaces keep their eyes on all such activity.

Switching Jobs Quietly

Something that a lot of us seem to forget is that in order to conduct our normal work tasks, many of us have gone ahead and configured our calendar to share its contents with our coworkers. This can become a problem if when you are interviewing with other companies you start to put things like “Interview with Company x” on your calendar! One of the things that motivates managers to change jobs is because they see it as a sign that they have the ability to learn new things quickly and they can quickly adapt to changes. The flip side to this is that if you are at a job for a lengthy period of time, people might start to view your job skills as having become stale.

When we are looking for our next employer, we need to make sure that we take the time to adequately research the firm. As we sort out the firms that we’d be willing to go to work for, we’ll end up sorting out the top firms that interest us the most. Once we’ve done this, we then need to reach out to our network and see if any of them can provide us with an introduction to the hiring manager. One thing that it is important to keep in mind is that you are going to want to continue to deliver high performance at your current job even as you search for your next job. Remember that if you are going to a job interview, you may run into someone that you know from your old job. If this happens, pretend like nothing unusual is going on.

What All Of This Means For You

The reality of life is that no job is forever. What this means for managers is that there will come a time that you will start to look for your next job. What we need to understand is that although this is an important thing to do, it can be very tricky to do correctly. We need to have to have a good understanding of the right way to go about doing it.

Although all managers will eventually be looking for their next job, it turns out that millennials tend to switch jobs three times as often as other workers do. When it comes time for you to go looking for your next job, you are going to want to go about doing it discretely. If you use LinkedIn to contact recruiters, remember that your privacy settings may allow others to see with whom you are talking. In order to find a job online you are going to have to post your resume online. However, if your current employer is looking for people with your same skills, your resume may be the one that they stumble over. If we’ve shared our calendar with our coworkers, we don’t want to note meetings with recruiters on it. Younger managers will switch jobs more rapidly in order to show that they can quickly learn new skills. During your job search, make sure that you still deliver high quality work at your current job.

Searching for our next job is never an easy thing to do. When a manager decides that it is time to move on, a very delicate set of steps is going to have to be taken in order to find the perfect next job. We need to keep in mind that we want to hold on to our current job and do team building until we’ve been able to land that next job. Take the time to show respect to the people that you are currently working with even as you search for where you want to go to next.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How much time during a day do you think that you should devote to your next job search?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How about if we agree to talk about a touchy topic: hugging. Yep, even in this #Metoo era, the concept of opening your arms up and then enveloping a coworker in a big hug is something that is still done in the workplace. You’d think that all of this would be going away in our ultra-sensitive political climate; however, that is not the case. In fact, there appears to be even more hugging going on at work these days. What do managers have to do in order to make sure that our embraces are going to be welcome?