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How to Find a More Fulfilling Career During the Great Resignation

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Can you tell that something is shifting? Over the past year of isolation and lockdown, many of us experienced a profound shift in perspective – we had newfound space to reflect on what really mattered, question assumptions, and dream up new possibilities for our lives and careers. Taking action on these new epiphanies, however, was extremely difficult to do in real time; the economy was in dire straits, and most of those lucky enough to still have jobs hunkered down in them for survival.

We’re looking at a decidedly different picture now. With parts of the world opening up, and recovering economies seeing a pick up in new job growth, all of that pent up desire for change finally has an outlet. And people worldwide are channeling their longstanding frustrations with the status quo of work by seizing this opportunity for change: a recent study found that over 40% of the global workforce is considering handing in their resignations. Economists have dubbed this phenomenon the “Great Resignation,” and it’s bringing hope to prospective job seekers while instilling fear in employers who have gotten away with ignoring their employee’s needs for far too long.

In Part I of our #GreatResignation4Change series, we took a closer look at some of the factors driving this historic level of turnover. In this second installment, we’re going to look at what the Great Resignation means specifically for employees and job-seekers, and how you can make the most of this historic opportunity to drive positive change in your life, career, and society at large.

This Is the New Normal

This isn’t a flash in the pan moment, or a series of isolated incidents. This is a truly global movement that has been a long time coming, and now that the metaphorical fuse has been lit by the spark of the pandemic, there is no going back. As Jack Kelly, CEO of one of the oldest and largest global talent search firms, poignantly captured in a Forbes article earlier this year, “There’s been a mood shift and change in the zeitgeist. We’ve learned firsthand how fragile life is. Many people have reexamined their lives. They realize they have a limited time here in this world. This has caused a bit of an existential moment. People have started thinking about what they’ve been doing and whether they want to continue on in the same job or career for the next five to 25 years. The results of this introspection clearly show that they want to make a move”

This is not an employee engagement problem that can be fixed with a ping-pong table in the break room. This is a fundamental referendum on our relationship to work itself. It’s as if we are collectively realizing that this isn’t a trial run; this is it. To quote Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” For many of us, the answer is not, “to grind away at a thankless 9-5 where I’m not seen, not heard, and not valued.” As we elaborate on in Part I of this series, the desire to do work that matters and has a greater purpose is not new, and also not going anywhere. 

Pair this shift in collective consciousness with the explosion of new job growth we’ve seen in recent months – particularly in future-forward fields like sustainability, clean energy, and regenerative agriculture, and the like – and it becomes clear that the balance of power has shifted, and that it’s shifted in favor of employees. That is to say, if your current employer is not willing to meet your evolving needs, there’s hardly been a better time to find another company that will. 

Even the ex-HR Chief of Google is warning that “returning to work is an imprintable moment for companies that could spell disaster” if employees don’t get the “support and compassion” they need. (If only Google had taken that approach to the employee activists walkouts in 2019, right?!)

We’ll share more about what this means for employers in the next installment of this series, but for employees and job-seekers, we hope that your key takeaway is this: right now, you have the leverage. And whether you plan to leave your job in search of something better or stay where you are and negotiate for better terms, the tips below will help you make the most of the “Great Resignation” to change your career for the better – both in terms of how it fits you, and how it contributes to the kind of world we’re trying to build back better. 

How to Make the Most of the Great Resignation

Riding the wave of the Great Resignation to find meaning and fulfillment in your work doesn’t necessarily have to mean leaving your existing job. But, it does mean that you should take action to build a plan and start taking small steps.

At your current company

As author Daniel Pink explains in the book Drive, regardless of their employment arrangement, employees consistently emphasize three drivers of satisfaction:

  • Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
  • Autonomy: The desire to direct our own lives
  • Mastery: The urge to get better and better at something that matters

If you want a fulfilling career, you need to be working in a way that aligns with your purpose, and gives you the opportunity and autonomy to exercise your strengths. 

In some cases, you can find the combination of purpose, autonomy, and mastery that you’re looking for within your existing company or team by making a few adjustments. And particularly right now, companies will be fighting to both recruit and retain talent, and employee turnover is extremely costly. That means that if you’ve been considering negotiating for a raise, asking for a sabbatical, advocating for a flexible schedule, or wanting more exposure to clients, now is an excellent time to work with your manager to jobcraft your current role into your ideal role. 

Psychology Today defines job crafting as when employees alter their jobs in such a way as to better suit their skills and interests, thereby increasing their job satisfaction. With job crafting, employees make subtle, yet meaningful changes to the scope of their work that in turn shift their mindset towards their sense of purpose.

Before doing so, we recommend taking some time to meaningfully reflect and introspect on what it is you really want. MovingWorlds Institute Global Fellow Maria’s story is a great example of what job crafting your way to a new career can look like based on a deeper sense of understanding of your own talents and strengths. To start this process, you’ll want to:

  1. Set SMART goals to guide your next steps
  2. Network across your company to identify opportunities and how to best go about this process unique to your organization
  3. Seek outside advice from a mentor, peer, or previous coworker or friend 
  4. Start taking actions, including negotiations with your manager, leadership, and/or HR

This might feel like a lot, but it can be easier and more productive than starting a new job from scratch. However, if you exhaust all your options, the following section provides advice on how to use the Great Resignation to seek a new job.

As a job-seeker 

If you know deep down that you’ve run your course with your existing company, now is a great time to find a new career that fits who you authentically are. One word of caution here: don’t make a knee-jerk decision out of frustration that leads to change just for change’s sake. If you do that, you risk being equally unsatisfied in your new role, just in a different setting – beginning the career change cycle all over again. The Great Resignation isn’t happening overnight, and you don’t need to leap until you’re ready to: that is, until you’ve taken the time to do the real thoughtful introspection required to point your compass in the right direction for your next step. 

The interactive exercises and templates in our 10-Step #SocialImpactCareerGuide are a great place to start uncovering things like your strengths, purpose drivers, top causes, ideal work environment, and more – all of which will lay the foundation for a successful career transition and help ensure that you end up somewhere you can thrive not only in the short-term but also in the long-term.

As you consider all of the options available to you, remember that social impact is not something that is limited to a specific field or organization type; the reality is that social impact is now something that can happen in every sector. Part of what we do in the MovingWorlds Institute is help Global Fellows expand their realm of possibilities to include roles that may not have been on their radar previously – something that we explore more fully in this blog post about what social impact jobs are, and how to find them.

For more insights and frameworks to help you approach your job search, check out this Insider’s Guide to Sustainability Careers webinar featuring Katie Kross, Managing Director of the Center for Energy, Development and the Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke University. Once you have a clearer picture of the type of job you want to transition into, check out this list of the 70 best places to find social impact jobs in 2021 to find the right opportunity for you. 

In Summary

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a fulfilling career, and each of our paths will be as unique as we are. I wrote this article not with the intention of convincing you to quit your job, but rather to show you that you have options – and that’s an empowering place to operate from.

If you’ve been considering a career change but waiting for the right time, now is an excellent time to start taking action. But even if you love your current job and company, this is still a great window of opportunity to start conversations with your team and manager about what you’d like your work to look like in the future.

For more customized support, apply to the MovingWorlds Institute Global Fellowship for the tools, network, and hands-on experience you need to leverage the Great Resignation to create a more fulfilling career.

What is “The Great Resignation?”

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If you have found yourself re-evaluating your priorities as a result of the pandemic, you’re not alone. In fact, data shows that professionals across geographies, industries, and sectors are thinking about leaving their jobs in record numbers:

  • A Work Trends survey conducted by Microsoft found that 41% of workers globally are thinking about handing in their notice.
  • A UK and Ireland based survey found that 38% of employees were planning to leave their jobs in the next six months to a year.
  • According to research from McKinsey, nearly 50% of US-based employees said that they are reconsidering the kind of work they do because of the pandemic. Millennials were three times more likely than others to say that they were reevaluating work.

This phenomenon has been dubbed “The Great Resignation,” a term originally coined by Texas A&M University professor Anthony Klotz in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in May 2021. In this first installment of our #GreatResignation4Change series, we’re going to explore the recent factors that came together to drive this spike in employee turnover, and how it fits into the broader context of the shift towards purposeful work that has been in motion for years. 

Why are people leaving their jobs now?

There are a number of reasons that this historic level of turnover is happening at this particular moment. Let’s look at a few of the recent factors driving resignation numbers up:

People are increasingly searching for purpose at work

A groundbreaking piece of research from Net Impact, “What Workers Want”, highlighted that increasingly the workforce is looking for more purpose at work, and will even take pay cuts to work at a company that aligns with their own values. We have seen this every day at MovingWorlds for the past decade – people want their careers to contribute to the greater good, and are educated, empowered, and emboldened to pursue that in greater numbers. The pandemic just put this into sharper focus.

Jack Kelly, CEO of one of the oldest and largest global talent search firms, summed this up nicely in Forbes: “There’s been a mood shift and change in the zeitgeist. We’ve learned firsthand how fragile life is. Many people have reexamined their lives. They realize they have a limited time here in this world. This has caused a bit of an existential moment. People have started thinking about what they’ve been doing and whether they want to continue on in the same job or career for the next five to 25 years. The results of this introspection clearly show that they want to make a move.” 

Employees expectations are changing, and they want more flexibility

It was a major undertaking for employers and employees alike to pivot and adapt to virtual work at the onset of the pandemic. And employers who want to reverse that trend and return to “business as usual” are running up against a lot of resistance. After enduring over a year of lockdown coupled with tremendous stress, employees are not the same people they were when they started working from home in early 2020. As Professor Klotz explained in his Bloomberg interview, “the many pandemic-related epiphanies—about family time, remote work, commuting, passion projects, life and death, and what it all means—that can make people turn their back on the 9-to-5 office grind.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella echoes this point, explaining in a World Economic Forum interview that, “Employee expectations are changing, and we will need to define productivity much more broadly – inclusive of collaboration, learning and wellbeing to drive career advancement for every worker, including frontline and knowledge workers, as well as for new graduates and those who are in the workforce today. All this needs to be done with flexibility in, when, where and how people work.”

These turnover numbers are sending a clear message to employers: prioritize and honor your employee’s needs, or they will find another company that will.

The pandemic gave people the time and space to re-evaluate their priorities

On top of adjusting to the abrupt pivot to virtual work, many of us were also facing tremendous personal stress over the last year. Whether that involved becoming the sole breadwinner after a spouse lost their job, managing the emotions that come with having a family member hospitalized due to COVID, not being able to visit elderly relatives, or even missing the birth of you new niece or nephew in another city – none of us escaped the pandemic completely unscathed by loss in some form.

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Professor Klotz explained that, “During the pandemic, lots of people experienced mild or major forms of trauma, and lots of uncertainty about their life. Lots of people were having revelations about how they wanted to spend their time moving forward.” When life as you know it comes to an abrupt halt, operating on auto-pilot is no longer an option – the pandemic was a major wake up call, and that’s something you can’t undo. According to research from McKinsey, in the US alone nearly two-thirds of employees surveyed said that COVID-19 has caused them to reflect on their purpose in life.

As the economy recovers, the number of job opportunities is increasing exponentially

At the onset of the pandemic, the job market was dire: millions of people lost their jobs, and those lucky enough to remain employed “hunkered down” in their roles for survival. Professor Anthony Klotz explained in his Bloomberg interview that, “When there’s uncertainty, people tend to stay put, so there are pent-up resignations that didn’t happen over the past year. This should lead to a mass exodus of workers leaving their companies for greener pastures with better opportunities.” 

And there are a lot of greener pastures to choose from. The most recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that job openings in April soared to a record 9.3 million, as the economy rapidly recovered from its pandemic depths. In light of this, people are becoming more optimistic about the future – and when people feel secure, they take chances and make changes they wouldn’t have otherwise.

The bigger picture: A global movement towards purposeful work

Looking at the factors above, it would be easy to conclude that this is a one-off event solely attributable to the pandemic. But the reality is that this “great resignation” has been years in the making, and the pandemic was the spark that lit the metaphorical fuse.

Leaders have been out of touch with employee’s needs since well before the pandemic

Back in 2018, before the pandemic even started, Gallup found that only 34% of employees were engaged at work – meaning that 66% of employees were disengaged and dissatisfied in their careers. Why? Because the shareholder primacy model of capitalism, in which employees are expendable and financial profit dominates all, isn’t working anymore. People want to feel like their work means something – and while this “meaning deficit” was accelerated by the pandemic, its roots stretch back far before. 

In the book Drive, author Daniel Pink explains that regardless of their employment arrangement, employees consistently emphasize three drivers of satisfaction:

  • Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
  • Autonomy: The desire to direct our own lives
  • Mastery: The urge to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose matters because it’s a key component of meaning. According to the American Psychological Association, “finding meaning in one’s work has been shown to increase motivation, engagement, empowerment, career development, job satisfaction, individual performance and personal fulfillment, and to decrease absenteeism and stress.”

The bottom line is that in order to truly make an impact and find fulfillment in their careers, employees need to be working in a way that aligns with their purpose, and they need to work in a place that gives them the opportunity and autonomy to exercise their strengths. Companies who prioritize these factors will benefit from the great resignation – and companies who don’t will find themselves struggling to retain talent.

Purpose-driven work is here to stay

This craving for purpose isn’t new, and it’s not going anywhere. In fact, over the last decade there has been a growing movement for purposeful work that contributes to the greater good. Back in 2015, Northwestern University published a research paper about this very topic that goes on to explain, “Today, the lines between social issues and business are blurred. There is mounting pressure for companies to go beyond a basic standard of “doing well by doing good” to operating with an explicit purpose: to make positive contributions to society. At the same time, individuals are increasingly looking for meaning in their lives and, given the amount of time spent at work, it makes sense to look to the workplace as a source of meaning. Purpose in business is a growing trend that might actually shift our way of thinking about employee engagement.” 

A few years later, in 2018, Forbes published an article about this “purpose revolution,” stating that “More than ever, people are making purpose-based decisions as employees, consumers, and investors. They want their work and money not only to provide for their own material needs, but simultaneously to help create a better world.” 

These are only two examples of the thousands of other articles, thought pieces, and research studies dedicated to the growing movement towards purposeful work. That’s why at MovingWorlds, we don’t believe that this “great resignation” is a one-time or one-off event: this is the new normal. Employees are rightfully demanding to be treated as stakeholders, not just as inputs, and facilitating the shift towards a more just and equitable form of capitalism has been integral to MovingWorlds mission since its founding 10 years ago. 

In future installments of our #GreatResignation4Change series, we’ll share tips and resources to help job seekers make the most out of this opportunity, as well as tips and resources for companies working to retain employees by meeting their needs for flexibility, meaning, and purpose. Subscribe for updates to get them delivered straight to your inbox!