I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confidence was restored, the job hopping we'd expect to play out over the course of a couple of years all happened in a few months.
My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it.
As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.
I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors.
[1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.
I spent a not-insignificant amount of time emailing professors (roughly two professors per state) across the US asking if they had part-time PhDs. Most didn't respond to me, the ones that did gave me a polite "no".
I then look up "online part time PhDs" and found basically two places that offer a doctorate online, which was Purdue and University of York (England). I inquired about Purdue, and it seemed more managerial than technical, which I wasn't interested in.
I find a program that seems interesting at University of York and ask them if they have any openings for a remote part time PhD. They responded back with basically "well not if you want funding." I then replied with "What if I fund myself?" Two professors working together decided to give me a shot, so they asked me to write a research proposal, which I did. I guess it was good enough, because when I emailed them back, instead of saying "thanks but no thanks", they gave me tips on how to refine it. After a few months of back-and-forth working on the proposal (and finishing my undergrad), we got the proposal into a state we were happy with.
After that, I just applied on their online portal and managed to get an intake interview. The intake interview was basically "<x> is involved with this PhD. Are you OK with that?" or "What if you encounter <y>?" I guess I did well enough because I got an offer the next week. I start in April.
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Sorry for the life story, but I figured you might be able to be able to save yourself a few steps.
There are two major difficulties and one major advantage over the full-time version. The advantage is that you can work, so students aren't dependent on external funding or an ever-shortening runway of their own funds. This isn't a small thing. On the other side, though, it doubles the length of an already lengthy process (do people really want to be spending 7-10 years of all of their spare time unpaid and lonely?) and increases the chance the the candidate will drop out (in that they keep an alternative on-hand, rather than burning their employment bridges to do it full-time). Given how hard the PhD process can be, simply saying 'sod that' is always a temptation.
Anyway, it'll depend on the supervisor and the university. Some have policies against it, others are happy to consider.
But I bet everyone who hated their job before, and then suffered through who knows what god awful shit during the pandemic, starting looking as soon as they felt it was more safe.
It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.
yep that's me. I wanted to quit over a year ago but I kept putting it off due to pandemic circumstances.
but now that everyone sees omicron is a wet fart and things are going back to normal, I put in my notice yesterday.
With service workers, resistance to paying what it takes has a compounding effect, because being short-staffed forces people to pick up the slack for missing coworkers, and they end up burning out and quitting, or leaving for another job where the wages are better and the stress is lower.
Bernie Sanders ran 2 presidential campaigns and got a lot of airtime for worker power. And layoffs screw people over for short-term gain and then incur more costs when staffing up again. It is an embarrassing place to be in so businesses jump on the narrative of a great resignation.
Taking this view that nothing is going on at a macroscopic scale is like standing in the Himalayas and shouting "but the Earth is really smooth, almost spherical." While at a macroscopic scale you'd be very correct (technically oblate spheriod), the mountains and valleys localized around you are very real challenges you need to navigate. That's important if you never travel outside the Himilayas, maybe not if you're circumnavigating the Earth (just, avoid it, you know). Not everywhere is Kansas and if you ignore very real localized phenomena that may be unavoidable, you're going to have problems navigating if your specific scale can't compensate for it.
Official numbers are up ~50% between Nov 2020 and Nov 2021. IMO official numbers dramatically increased as vaccine mandates occurred and under reported.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm
Nov 2020 -> Nov 2021; percent change by region:
Northeast 1.8% -> 2.5%
South 2.8% -> 3.5%
Midwest 2.3% -> 3.1%
West 2.0% -> 2.8%
By dramatically increased you mean went from 1.8% during a pandemic when people were afraid to move around to 2.5% as things eased, well in line with historical levels.
I think the OP is much more accurate with the statement "the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated".
In fact, if you look back more than the year you picked, you'll see there was a huge drop, and the current blip is most likely those people feeling some relief from the pandemic. The rates are no where near out of line historically.
Here's historical data graphed for all 4 regions you listed.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR
And it's not a very big amount. If the rate lasts a long time let me know. Most likely, as should be clear from the graphs, there is very little out of the ordinary happening.
I suspect both are up higher than they were in 2019.
Most of the examples they cite are restaurants.
Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves.
There's a lot going on:
- Boomers, a huge part of the workforce, are beginning to retire, and they aren't coming back
- The US is near full employment [0]. As such, workers have more power. They can "resign" and go somewhere else relatively easily, or they don't have to take poor jobs
- If a business closes right now due to lack of workers, the owner might make the claim that Americans are just lazy & don't want to work, and corporate friendly media might push that idea. However, remember, we're at a time when we're approaching full employment. The business likely wasn't attractive to workers. So is it really the (lack of) workers' fault? Or was the business just poorly run? It's hard to admit that, and easy to blame others. It's OK for businesses to fail, though. Most do.
I think it's really a matter of perspective. If you're used to having a lot of workers (some of whom don't have the luxury of looking for a good job and need to take any job they can get, just to qualify for stuff like food assistance) fighting each other for the same job, so you're able to pay them less, this is a bad situation. If you're a worker who now has many employers vying for your talents, it's a good situation, but you rarely see that story being told in the corporate media.
0 - https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355...
I think you are overindexing on the corporate-media outlet connection and ignoring how simple it is for a journalist to write a trend piece from personal anecdotes. All it takes is three friends of a journalist to resign before said journalist feels like this is a 'nationwide trend'.
Link to the article for the subscribers: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for...
- 2011 changes the entire meaning of your post.
>Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies.
I don't think this is a valid assumption. I know a lot of people shifting from dual income families to one parent staying at home with the kids. Even more wanting to go from full time to part time positions.
The local regional/ trauma 2 hospital had (admittedly) lost more than 50% of nurses in a year, (unofficially) replaced fewer than half of those, and that was before any of the vaccine mandates were announced or deadlines set.
Vaccine politics have silenced them since then, but work shifts that were already understaffed at the start of covid with 1 MD, 2-3 mid-levels, and 6-8 nurses are still regularly making due with as little as 1 MD and 2 nurses.
Obviously nurses are a special case given... the state of things over the past 2 years. But those numbers are just absurd, even as an outlier.
I think assuming any sort of (near) net-zero shift in staffing is going to be wrong, be it within a particular office, business, profession, industry, or geographic area.
Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. It’s higher than normal turnover, but the stories are written in ways to suggest that companies everywhere are gutted by employees leaving in bulk. I feel like “great resignation” was deliberately chosen to mislead people into thinking people are just walking out of their jobs, which conjures images of a minor revolution.
Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. It’s likely that the worst of the worst companies are seeing a significant net loss of employees, but for most it just means turnover is up a tick.
The problem is compounded because the “great resignation” is a narrative that people really, really want to believe. Every time I brought up the actual data on HN, it’s met with anecdotes about somebody whose friend of friend’s company lost all of their employees or something. These anecdotes seem to be the fuel keeping the narrative going far beyond what the data supports.