If you are a white-collar worker, it is simply rational to view yourself first and foremost as a job quitter – someone who takes a job for a certain amount of time when the best outcome is that you quit for another job (and the worst is that you get laid off). So how does work change when everyone is trying to become a quitter? First of all, in the society of perpetual job searches, different criteria make a job good or not. Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company.
Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn't as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren't learning easily transferrable skills. It isn't a good job if it enmeshes you in local regulatory schemes and keeps you tied to a particular location. And it isn't a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.
In significant ways, the calculus of quitting changes workplace dynamics. Being a good manager now means helping those whom you manage acquire the skills that will help them to leave for a better job at another company. Good managers know this. I observed a Berkeley continuing education workshop for new managers, and one speaker described her strategies for behaving well to her team. She explained that she did this from the outset by clarifying what she understood their implicit business contract to be. She takes each new member of her team out to lunch in the week they start: ‘So I always say things like: ”You don't work for me, I work for you... My job is to make sure you can do your job well. And one day, you are going to leave this job, right, our careers are long, and we will have many jobs along the way. When you want to leave this job, I hope to be here to help you move on to this next job."' From the outset, managers say that they will help those who work under them become job-quitters – to find the next best stepping stone in their career.
