Should You Quit Your Job to Try Something New?

It’s the age-old question every professional has asked themselves when they feel “stuck”. The job might pay well, but it’s stifling and stale. If you’re considering quitting your job and catapulting yourself into the masses of job hunters browsing the market, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind first:

Ask Yourself These Key Questions Before You Pack Up Your Stuff

The first question to ask yourself is whether or not your job is fulfilling. If you don’t feel as if you’re making a real, measurable impact at your workplace, it can affect everything from your enthusiasm to get up in the morning, to your desire to take that promotion.

Tied closely to job fulfillment is room for growth. Are there even promotions that you can apply for? If you’re feeling stunted in your current position and it feels as if you’ve hit a wall in terms of your job progress, it may be worth casting a line out and seeing what else is out there.

Third, consider your work/life balance. Some people thrive on bringing their work home with them. Others drop their briefcase at the door the moment five o’clock rolls around.

And last but certainly not least is compensation. Are you getting paid the way you’d want considering your job responsibilities and workload?

If you’ve answered “no” to one or more of these issues, it may be time to take the plunge -- but not without doing some research first.

Uncovering Opportunities

The technology sector in the U.S. added 200,000 jobs to its roster in 2017, valuing what is already one of the largest and most lucrative areas for employment into a 1.6 trillion dollar business.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, data scientist and information research scientist jobs are growing at a rate of nearly 20% year over year, according to the job outlook forecast. Currently, data scientists earn an average of $114,520 per year. Web developers and UX designers are also integral positions in a growing and hungry technology field, with a job growth outlook of 15% year over year and an average salary of $67,000.

Typical job growth rates year to year range around 7%, so this unprecedented growth means that jobs in these fields are showing no sign of slowing down for the foreseeable future. Technology jobs in general tend to break the traditional mold of spending one’s life in a cubicle, and new innovations in remote work allow many data scientists, UX designer and web developers to work from any location.

You may be surprised to learn that remote work is the most sought-after perk among U.S. job hunters, with a whopping 81% selecting this kind of flexibility as the perk they want the most. Not only does this type of adaptive arrangement allow for greater happiness and improved employee retention, but it also brings in the best possible talent for the job.

So the discontent with your current job is there, and the potential for a career in tech is certainly ripe for the taking, but one key question remains:

Do You Have the Financial “Safety Net” to Transition to a New Job?

You’ll need to consider whether you’ll be working part time or full time. If you’re looking to get technology training, you’ll want to factor the cost of that into your expenses as well. Because student loan debt is becoming such a pervasive problem in the education industry, many schools have adopted ISAs or Income-Sharing Agreements.

ISAs allow you to pay for your education over time using your income. This prevents you from taking on the considerable debt of a student loan, or waiting until when you can realistically afford it (which never seems to happen). With an ISA, your payments toward your education are adjusted based on how much you make. And as you continue to move up the ladder in your job and get paid more, so too will you be able to pay more toward your education.

Of course, income sharing agreements only work when there is an income to begin with, so the impetus is on the educational institution to do as much as possible to help their students enjoy gainful employment. This is where the rubber truly meets the road in terms of learning the kinds of in-demand skills profiled above, so that there’s an outcome where everyone wins.

A Guaranteed Job?

Some schools, like Thinkful, not only use ISAs to help more students pay for their education, but they also offer a guaranteed job upon successful completion of the course. As members of the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, you can see precisely what kinds of jobs their graduates got, with which company, and when. Kind of puts the old notion of “unpaid college internships” to shame, doesn’t it?