A good friend of mine sent me an article yesterday about the trend of more people starting to jump ship from bad jobs into new opportunities. You can check out the entire article here:
http://www.clickondetroit.com/money/23841071/detail.html
What is fascinating and heartening to me, is that it now seems that the tables are turning in the job market. For the first time in a long time, individuals feel confident enough to leave paying positions for what they perceive to be better employment opportunities. This is a deep, psychological shift from what we have been seeing in the job market since 2008. For the past few years, employers have been able to cut staff and financial incentives to incumbent workers, knowing that most people would be too scared to leave their jobs in such a down economy.
Now, finally, it is all beginning to change. The hiring is just starting and it is only going to improve as we move through 2010 and into 2011.
What is even more interesting is that organizational leaders are beginning to look elsewhere for new fertile ground to till. This article notes:
“There is going to be a mass exodus of the top performers as the economy starts to turn around,” predicts Razor Suleman, a consultant who helps companies retain their best workers. About 25 percent of companies’ top performers said they plan to leave their current job within a year, according to a survey published in the May edition of the Harvard Business Review. By contrast, in 2006, just 10 percent planned to leave their jobs within a year. The survey questioned 20,000 workers who were identified by their employers as “high potential.”
This means that as the economy improves, there will be a renewed war for talent and businesses will now have to compete for both in-house talent as well as for quality new hires that will be brought into their companies. For the next few months, it will still be a buyers’ market, where employers will be hiring top-quality talent as their organizations emerge from the recession.
But we will see a dramatic shift by 2011, where companies will have to implement new incentive programs to retain their best and brightest, while attracting quality candidates from an employee pool that is just starting to shrink.
So, if you are still out of work, take heart. Your job now is to keep networking and keep yourself on the employment radar screen with companies in your field of expertise. You may have already noticed that you are getting more calls and interviews. That is the first sign that the tables are turning. So, keep out there, in the open and be encouraged that things are finally turning around.
