Morning all!

Today, I wanted to share my experience when it comes to finding new work versus staying where you are and trying to build a better situation.

So the aim of my article is to:

Show you why you should always leave your job

Lets see if I succeed!

To properly convey my point, I think I need to outline what led me to this mindset. There’s no better way to do that than providing a backstory for my choices.

It all started for me in 2016, when I got my first ‘proper’ job as an IT apprentice for a fairly small and very old fashioned ERP company in the UK. I was fresh out of college and working part-time retail jobs.

This was started VERY slow, I mean glacially slow. With the simplest of tasks too, involving password resets and email queries. It was good to start off with, but most days were spent trying to look busy.

Over time, I grew an interest for development. I started ‘looking busy’ by actually being busy. I developed my own apps and even some for work. During this time, my pay was always very low. I was an apprentice, which can somehow get paid less than minimum wage which is just criminal if you ask me.

Over the years, the work improved. I clawed more responsibilities for myself and my pay slightly increased. I was on around £23,000 a year.

In 2019, a much larger American company purchased us and the chaos ensued. It was like this was the first purchase they had ever made. EVERYONE in the company got a ‘risk of redundancy’ letter.

Talk about shaking the tree!

When the dust had finally settled, I found myself with a permanent position helping the American company integrate newly acquired companies.

Even though my responsibilities had increase drastically, I still had to find other work and ‘threaten’ to leave before they reluctantly gave me an increase in salary. Going up to £27,000 a year.

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I stayed in this position for roughly 3 years. Always with the promise of a job title change and a salary to match my current work.

Manager after manager found excuse after excuse to postpone my advancement or think of creative reasons to not move forward.

My favourite was:

HR doesn’t have the career path mapped out yet so we can’t move forward

or the ever tummy tickling:

We can update your job title if you really want, but since we aren’t at the review season yet, there wouldn’t be a salary increase and since you’d have the job title already we couldn’t increase your salary when review season came around

To be honest, I should have seen all these red flags along the way. But I had a young family that I had to support, so the steady pay check was enough to keep me hooked.

I finally grew sick of everything to do with that company. The work, the management and the attitude towards it’s employees.

I searched for other work, and after about 4 months of careful search I found a new role. Completely different management style, much higher salary and a workload that was fresh.

I jumped at the opportunity and after a months notice period, I had almost double my salary and cut the umbilical cord with the workplace I had grown to dislike.

In short, I got what I wanted in 3 months after waiting 3 years

I won’t name my current or previous employers here however, I don’t think that would be fair. I had a bad experience, but I’m sure others would love it… Low pay and ever increasing liability, what’s not to like?

Pay peanuts, hire monkeys!

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Now that you know my story, I wanted to touch on the main aspects that I found improved once I switched jobs. And what I think are the main benefits of leaving a position that has become stale, rather than staying and hoping something changes:

Career Growth

Moving roles gave me an instant boost in salary. A fight I had been locked into for years with my previous role. My salary practically doubled with one job change.

With my new role being completely different to my previous role, there’s a lot of new stuff to learn. It’s not focused solely on IT and it’s role inside a business, my new role is more software install, maintenance and troubleshooting. But there are a ton of closely nit departments for me to sink my teeth into also.

Skill Development

This can be both the best part and also the scariest when switching jobs. You’re leaving a role you knew and were probably very comfortable in, to a new role that you potentially know nothing about.

Whenever things get hard for me in my new role, or everything difficult in life really, I like to repeat a little phrase in my head:

If I’m comfortable, I’m not growing

This single phrase helps me push through the times were I’m completely confused, or I’ve messed something up or I’m just missing the familiarity of my previous role.

I now have the opportunity to learn a whole new set of skills for a whole new set of technologies. It’s really exciting but can be daunting. Taking one step at a time is very important.

Networking

The idea of networking to me as always been kind of foreign. It was never taught to me throughout my entire education, college or apprenticeship but it’s vital when growing a career.

Knowing people in strong positions, leaving a workplace on good terms and being friendly and open with every colleague and customer is paramount to success.

You know that if you need something, there might be someone you know from the past that can lend a hand. I had this a couple of years ago, right when we got the ‘risk of redundancy’ letters, I was talking to a customer on the phone. They knew nothing about the buyout or redundancies yet however, they really liked my work ethic and the standard of work I had done on their systems, and told me I had a spot with them if I chose to take it.

I was very candid with them. I told them I had never had an offer like that before, so I wasn’t sure what to say. Just that I was really thankful that they valued me and that I would keep them in mind.

Improved Work-Life Balance

This one doesn’t apply to me however, it is still worth noting. If you are moving from an office based role to a work-from-home position, this can help massively when you have a family and school runs to juggle in the mornings.

I have been a work-from-home employee since COVID first started, so the idea of office working to me is kind of bizarre unless you have a team that needs to be together in person.

I did struggle with the move however, it wasn’t completely plain sailing. As I mentioned before, the role and workload was completely different. I spent the first couple of months almost like a dear in headlights, trying to search for a start line so that I knew I was moving forward.

The team I have now is super helpful, we actually have documented processes which wasn’t a thing in my previous role. I actually created the documentation!

I wanted to highlight some of the issues I faced when switching roles and how I got over them:

Familiarity

I want to break this section up into two parts: people and purpose

People

I had spent 5 years at the same company, so it was fair to say that I had made some friends and was very comfortable with the people I worked with.

So the idea of moving to a new role where there might not be like-minded people to have a closer dynamic with was scary.

But this is just a trap that your brain makes, it’s called the tribal brain effect. Simply put, we are tribal animals so once we have found a group of people that we fit into, it causes the physical pain receptors in our brain to fire when we leave. Again, when we actually had tribes, if you were alone you were more likely to die.

Purpose

My work was second nature to me, I had documented everything but knew the processes like the back of my hand. Yes things changed but nothing phased me anymore. It was definitely starting to feel like ground-hog day.

However, I was stuck in the region beta paradox. Things were just good enough to keep me from changing and finding a better position. Even though I could find something better, it wasn’t bad enough yet to make me change and so I was stuck in a position that could improve, but I chose not to.

Stability

What if your new role doesn’t work out?

What if you hate the work?

What if your new boss isn’t a good fit for you?

All these questions certainly were at the front of my mind when I was switching jobs, but I think they are just a reflection of where you currently are. If I asked those questions to the job I previously held, they aren’t good answers either.

So the idea of switching jobs and finding a worse position is very unlikely since you would have vetted this opportunity better than your previous. And the only reason you are even thinking of switching is because deep down, you know it’s a better fit and the right choice to make.

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So that’s it, that’s everything I wanted to lay out when I switch jobs for the first time ever in my career.

Was it scary? YES!

Would I do it again? YES!

Remember growth only happens when you’re uncomfortable.

Even to this day I have thoughts about if I made the right choice, but remembering where I came from and that things couldn’t get worse keeps me going.

Along with some nice quotes that I often remind myself of. I’ll leave these below:

‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts’
‘It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required’
‘It’s either one day, or day one’
‘Pain is forgotten, and the achievement takes it’s place’
‘A ship works fine and is safe at the harbour. But that’s not what it’s built for’
‘If I don’t have the discipline to perform when I don’t want to. Then I don’t deserve the honour of performing when I do want to’

Let me know about your experiences with switching jobs in the comments below. Let me know if you liked this style of article too!

It’s much longer and on a completely different topic to my usual post.

Enjoy! 🎉