Have you ever wondered how long is too long to stay at a job? Like most philosophical questions, the answer may depend on your perspective. When you're enjoying the job, you're more likely to feel fine about staying as long as you can. When you're unhappy, it usually feels as if you've stayed too long already.
If the happy/unhappy barometer seems somewhat imprecise for such an important question, you may want to apply a more disciplined approach when deciding whether to remain in your position. After all, feelings can be notoriously changeable. One day you're feeling great and would stay forever; the next day you're nursing a bruised ego and searching the want ads.
Using feelings as a guide for important decisions has other drawbacks. When we respond to our emotions, we're usually working with short-term information to make long-term choices. In the short term, we're angry, bored or frustrated, and so we set out to correct the problem by finding a job that seems to promise relief from those emotions.
If we're lucky, we might find such a job. More often, however, we replace one position with another that turns out to have similar problems. I can't explain why that happens, except to say there must be a universal law stating that unexamined mistakes will repeat themselves.
Although the safe course would seem to be to stay in the first job and avoid getting another one just like it, we know that's really a cop-out. Staying in a bad job out of fear of getting a worse one is just another version of following short-term emotions to make long-term choices.
To break this cycle, apply better criteria to the stay-or-leave decision. Here is the first question I ask people when they seem stuck on this point: Do you think you will stay long enough to retire from this job? The answer is almost always "No."
This quick response is not so surprising. If someone is trying to decide whether to leave a job, he or she already has begun severing ties emotionally. So, although that person may hesitate to leave in the near term, he or she no longer anticipates being linked to the company down the road.
The simple truth is that, in most cases, the question is not really "Should I leave?" but "WHEN should I leave?"
This clarification alone can make a world of difference in breaking the stalemate. Now that you know the real question is about a date on the calendar, you can begin to look at the problem systematically.
For example, if you plan to work 15 more years and you don't plan to stay in your current job until retirement, you can work backward on the plan. Start by asking yourself: "What is the job I want to retire from?" When you have that answer, you can begin defining the strategy for getting it. If the job will require extra training, a license or a relocation, you can start planning now how you will meet those requirements.
Once you have discovered the steps needed to get the next job, you can begin putting them on a timeline. If it will take a year or more to prepare for this job search, is there any reason to delay starting?
What if you don't know what the next job will be, but you do know that you're unhappy now? What if you're not unhappy, but you have a vague sense that you're harming your career by staying in one place so long?
Both questions can be addressed using the same tool: your list of long-term goals. (What? You don't have one of these? Sit down now and get one started.) By reviewing your goals in connection to your job, you can discover whether your current position is helping you get where you want to go or whether you've stalled out.
The bottom line is pretty straightforward: If staying on the job is helping you reach goals, you should make whatever changes are necessary for you to feel happy there. If you're not reaching your goals, you need to figure out why. If the job is the problem, consider moving on, even if you're enjoying it. Or else revise those goals.
Perhaps the only wrong answer would be to look for contentment in a job that is at odds with your goals. This recipe for unhappiness is almost never necessary.
- Amy Lindgren owns Prototype Career Service, a career consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com or at 1071 W. Seventh St., St. Paul, MN 55102.