The Great Career Migration

Amid so much turmoil and pain, the pandemic has given us an unexpected gift -- we’ve been able to look at our lives through a completely different lens. I said it on TikTok, and I’ll say it again here -- in the next two to three years, we are going to see the largest career migration in history. 

More people are going to change companies, jobs, and career paths than ever before.  

Even though companies are being led by people who are experiencing this refreshed way of looking at the world, same as all of us, I think this large-scale movement will catch them by surprise. We’re starting to see it in hotels, restaurants, and retailers struggling to hire the people they fired or furloughed last spring. Many of these workers are refusing to return to those jobs, causing firms to raise wages to attract new employees to these empty positions. Even companies like Starbucks, ones known for great benefits and compensation, are finding it difficult to staff roles and many locations have had to cut back on hours of operation as a result.  

After a year of such personal upheaval, and after a prolonged period of living differently, many have taken the opportunity to learn new skills, experiment with different career paths and work and many simply have realized how they built their lives can be different as they have all been forced to live differently. The pandemic in a way has served as a radical perspective shift of epic proportions where people over many months who have spent their time differently are recognizing new truths - maybe my commute was too long, maybe I love being with my family way more than being away, maybe I dislike having to travel so much, maybe I love the freedom to get a haircut at 10 am on Tuesday instead of having to fight for a spot on weekends. 

 For many, this time during the pandemic has brought a surprising benefit. People have been given enough cushion, be it via stimulus payments or just being able to save while the world was on lockdown, that they have more freedom to make decisions than ever before. More than just not returning to work, some people are throwing in the towel -- they’re done with a system that doesn’t serve them. 

 At the same time, we’re seeing employers who are willing to work with what employees need rewarded -- take this Pittsburgh ice cream shop who received over 1000 applications after announcing they were offering higher wages. 

 On the knowledge worker side, data is coming out that people would rather quit than come back to the office. This is an echo of what we’re seeing on the retail/hospitality side. The power is in the hands of professionals, who, through remote work, suddenly have options to take jobs on the other side of the country without moving from their home office to their kitchen. People who left major cities during the pandemic aren’t interested in coming back -- maybe they moved to the suburbs where they have more space and a lower cost of living, somewhere they feel they can better pursue their interpretation of the American dream. Still, others may have moved to cities where they’ve always wanted to live, but couldn’t because their field was limited to a specific geographic area. It’s a career migration as a direct result of our emotional and physical movement over the past year -- or lack thereof. The life math for everyone just shifted. I’ve had many people tell me they’ve realized they can live with far fewer things and at a lower cost than they thought they could pre-pandemic. This is truly a moment - a big big moment in the world of work.

 For Americans who wrap their identity around their work as much as any nation in the world, this has served as a jolt to that notion. When I cannot socialize, when I am the same size zoom box as every other person in my company -- maybe what I was fighting for, maybe that climb up the corporate ladder looks differently to me now. Maybe who I am is defined more by my family time and those closest to me than the organization that pays me and the title on my LinkedIn profile. 

 All this prolonged period is creating a new way of looking at our relationship to work that is going to lead to massive job and career changes in the years ahead. People who are now dissatisfied with work will start to build a new pathway as they consider what they want in life and their careers. For some, this is already happening and for others, they are still in the planning phase. When I shared this on TikTok, over 500 people told me they have already undertaken a major career pivot. 

We’re going to see more of this. This flexibility is going to create a pathway for more and more people to pursue new skills, different opportunities, and new places because there’s nothing like a pandemic to remind you now is all you have.  

 For work, the movement is here -- we’re looking at a workquake.