Articles for Job Seekers #resignation
After your masterful negotiation and acceptance of the offer, the next step is to resign from your current position. If there is even the slightest chance that your background check or drug screen for your new employer might be problematic, wait to resign until those are clear. Decide going in if you are open to a counteroffer. This is not a game, and you likely only get one chance to pull this off. In other words, they might throw more money or a promotion at you to get you to stay the first time you resign, but if you try it again two years later, don’t expect similar results. Any time you discuss leaving with your current employer, you must be mentally and emotionally prepared for them to let you walk away. If they do woo you to stay, pause and think about what was driving you to look in the first place. Counteroffers generally result in the employee staying for six more months but then leaving after all. You will likely have burned the bridge with the company who made you an offer, so think carefully about the resignation and counteroffer implications.
For decades, entire generations of workers were taught that the pinnacle of career goals was longevity in a position but gone are the days of service anniversary celebrations and vested pension plans. For those of us who were taught to create an identity around our loyalty to the organization we work for, the new paradigm of the “portable professional” can be a difficult one to onboard.
Whether your relationship with your current job is on excellent terms or you are fleeing a job that you hate, creating a transition plan to set your replacement up for success and leave you looking like a polished professional. It is a rarely required, infrequently requested way to leave your former team on good terms and set your former company up for moving on without you.
