How To Quit Your Job

Quitting your job can be amazing. You hate your workplace, your boss is like Satan incarnate, your commute has you sit next to the same smelly person on the train every day that has their earphones loud enough to qualify as a functioning stage at Glastonbury and there’s never any milk in the fridge.

Sometimes quitting your job is terrible. Your workplace is lovely. Your colleagues are your friends, your boss is like your favourite well-meaning teacher from school and there’s always milk in the fridge, it’s just another company is offering you a promotion and a 30% pay rise.

Either way, you will at some point need to tell them you’re jumping ship, and you need to do it quicker than Leonardo Di Caprio jumped ship in Titanic because you’ve already agreed a start date for 5 weeks’ time and don’t want to be stranded on a door.

If you hate your job, it’s easy to be over-zealous in your resignation style. If you love your job it’s easy to freak out, bottle it and make a complete mess of it. However, I’m helpfully here to guide you;

The Letter

The first thing you want to do is write up your resignation letter. If you’ve been despising your job, the chances are you’ve thought long and hard about this letter already and in some cases, will have one written up and in your desk, ready at a moments’ notice that you only need to slap a date on.

It is 100% necessary to have a letter ready before you quit. If you’re feeling guilty about leaving, no one wants the awkward situation of telling someone you’re quitting and then going back to them later in the day to hand them a letter doing the same thing.

That’s like taking off a plaster, then putting it back on again to take off some more. Or waxing. No one wants to wax a cut you should have had a plaster on.

Keep the letter formal, simple, to the point, respectful and friendly. You may be relishing the opportunity to tell your work where to shove it, but handled badly, you don’t want a company full of people badmouthing you with written proof.

Mention that you appreciate the opportunity afforded to you, have a clear end date and your intention to perform a full handover to ease the transition into life post-you.

The Talk

This is the riskiest part. A lot hinges on how delicately you handle this.

Go in crying and you’ll be putting yourself under a lot of pressure to have your commitment to leaving tested and talked out of it.

Going in breakdancing with a smile on your face and Tim Westwood airhorns going off will come across with such disrespect you’re likely to make things prickly.

Have conviction in what you’re doing but be respectfully reserved. Don’t make it personal, it is a business decision - whether it’s for personal reasons or not. Ask your line manager for a private moment of their time, explain what it is you’re leaving to go and do and stick to your guns.

You want to start by facing the situation head-on and say that you’re talking to them to hand your notice in. Usually at this point, your manager will ask why, to which you should explain the opportunity at your new employer and state the benefits and/or progression and/or increase in responsibilities and/or pay.

Try not to make it sound like you’re pitching this new job but be convincing enough to try to stop what will often come next;

The Counter

If you’re any good at your job, the chances are that your manager will want to keep you around, which inevitably means that they’re going to try and talk you out of leaving. 62% of candidate that resign will be countered. Some of this will come at the actual time you speak to them about resigning.

You’ll be hit with guilt worse than that time you skipped that family birthday so you could do down the pub with your friends but didn't tell your Mum and they will be trying to play on your shared experience and how much they value your input.

Stay strong.

Statistically, 90% of people that accept a counter offer leave anyway within 12 months, although 80% will have gone within 6 months.

An extra few quid on the salary and a promise to fast-track you into the next promotion may add a new-found novelty factor to the day-to-day, but after a few weeks you realise you still hate your workplace, your commute still has you sat next to someone that smells and will clearly have hearing issues later in life and there still isn’t any milk in the fridge. But now you can afford your own milk.

The Handover

In some cases, depending on your role, you’ll be told you can leave immediately. Great times! Kind of.

Whilst you’ll have a lot of free time to do all your washing and go to the gym to the level you said you would when you first joined, the boredom will set in watching Homes Under The Hammer to see how football legend Dion Dublin rates the home renovations the plucky ‘contestants’ have clearly bodged. You then find yourself getting complacent in your laziness in the run up to starting a new job.

However, a lot of the time you will be required to work your notice. Now you may hate your job, your colleagues and your boss, but now is not the time to lay back and watch Homes Under The Hammer on BBC iPlayer to see how football legend Dion Dublin rates the home renovations the plucky ‘contestants’ have clearly bodged, you want to leave yourself a pleasant legacy and handover properly.

A good handover will leave the work you have toiled over for the past however long, in the most capably-prepared hands, whether they’re competent or not, and will also not alienate you. After all, there is the possibility you could work with these people again at some point in the future.

Don’t besmirch your shining reputation by calling it in for the last few weeks you work somewhere.

The Leaving Do

Should everything I've mentioned in this piece so far have gone well, you will be gearing up for a large leaving party. You have a widespread network of friendly acquaintances at your workplace that will look for any excuse to go out for a beer and it’s all about you. This is a time to bask in.

But don’t overplay it. Don’t see it at the last hurrah to tell that person from Finance that you stole their lunch semi-regularly because you knew it annoyed them and laughed at the notes they put up in the kitchen moaning about it.

Don’t tell that other person from Finance that you’d wished you’d got off with them at the Christmas party because you’d always had a bit of a soft spot for them.

By all means, enjoy yourself, you’ve got a few days until you start you new job so you can afford to get merry, but have some grace about yourself.

Quitting is a fine art that many will fumble through like a drunk person playing the fairground game where you don’t let the hoop-wand-needle thing touch the wire. Others will bullishly plough through it with careless abandon like a professional rugby player tackling a 6-year-old full-pelt.

It’s a minefield of a process, play it delicately.