5 Easy-to-Miss Signs It’s Time to Look for a New Job
In the fast-paced world of supply chain news, it’s easy to forget about our own career satisfaction. Is it time for you to re-evaluate yours? Is it your time to move on?
When was the last time you asked yourself if you were happy at work? And not just satisfied, not just spinning on the hamster wheel, but really, truly happy? If you haven’t asked yourself this recently, it might be high time you do.
While work is not the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to life satisfaction, our careers are certainly critical in helping us find purpose and meaning. Yet, especially in procurement and supply chain, it’s easy for us to get really, really busy. It’s all too easy, in fact, for us to get so involved in what we’re doing that we forget to ask ourselves what our goals are and whether we’re really meeting them. In other words, it’s easy for us to overlook signs that it might be time to look for a new job.
Could this be you? Could dissatisfaction be bubbling away under the surface and you haven’t even noticed? Here’s five easy-to-miss signs it might be time to look for a new job.
1. You’re not learning anymore
What we want from work is not a one-size-fits-all. Sometimes, we’re raring to go and want to learn and work as much as possible. Yet at other times, we’re focused on our family or other things, and we’re happy to do our bit at work and leave it at that.
Regardless of what life stage you’re at, work should always present an opportunity to learn and grow. You should feel challenged by at least some of the tasks you do, and there should always be opportunities to diversify your technical and soft skill set. You should always have a goal of some sort, and be working towards it.
If you’re not offered any opportunities to do any of this, then it could be time to look for a new job. Employees want work that engages and interests them, and the best companies recognise this and always offer everyone the opportunity to grow.
2. You’ve got nowhere to go
There’s many important goals you can have at work, with a promotion being just one (if this is what you’re after by the way, here is how you get it). Perhaps, for example, you want to deepen your technical expertise, or gain experience across a range of projects. Perhaps you want to join a committee, or even explore working part-time, pursuing a passion project or spending more time with family.
Whatever your next ‘move’ might be, your company needs to be able to support it to the best of their ability. If you’re in a job, and no one can see you doing (or will allow you to do) anything outside of that job, then it could be time to move on. And while there is no specified timeframe for this, experts suggest that if you’ve been in a job for three or more years and there’s nowhere to go, the place to go is out.
3. You never get any feedback
Feedback is a powerful tool. It helps you to learn, develop, and understand your strengths, weaknesses and goals. In fact, the more feedback you receive (and action), the more quickly you’re likely to progress in an organisation. Even if feedback feels uncomfortable, it’s necessary to help you be your best.
So if you work for a company that doesn’t have a culture of feedback (and worse, if your manager seems to despise performance appraisals or doesn’t take them seriously), it could be time to move on. No feedback is like trying to swim without knowing how. You might be able to float by pure accident, but more than likely you’ll get nowhere.
4. There’s far more departures in your team than new hires
When was the last time that someone new joined your team? If you can’t remember, that might not be a good thing, especially if there’s no new people and quite a few departures.
When it comes to work in procurement, Parkinson’s law (where work expands to fill the time available) doesn’t always occur. If people in your team leave, you’ll naturally have to take on their work. And then if someone else leaves, your share of the work pie will continue to expand. More work (and likely, not more pay) can be a frustrating experience.
Beyond this, if people are leaving and your company isn’t hiring anyone new, you’ve got cause to be suspicious. Are there financial issues? Is your company offshoring? Do they not place enough emphasis on procurement? Whatever the answer is to these questions, it might not be positive, and could be a sign that you need to move on.
5. You’ve got a bad ‘gut feeling’
If an executive in your organisation made a decision based on ‘gut feeling,’ you’d likely laugh at them, especially given the business’s world preference for analytical and data-based decision-making.
But perhaps you shouldn’t.
There’s much to be said for your ‘gut-feel’ about things, says neuroscientist Valerie van Mulukom. Gut feelings, or intuitions, are often the result of a complex decoding process that occurs in our brains, where we constantly compare different information and past experiences to draw conclusions. The result, a prediction or ‘gut feel’ is actually a lot more rational than you might think.
What this essentially means is that if you have a ‘gut feeling’ that your job isn’t right for you for any reason, you might well be correct, and it could be time to move on.
Have you noticed a shift in your gut feeling or job satisfaction as a result of the pandemic? We’d love to know about your experiences! Tell us with our exciting new survey created in conjunction with Compleat, What Next?
Oh, and did we mention that it takes less than 15 minutes? What are you waiting for! Take the Survey here.
