Why So Many People Are Changing Careers During A Pandemic

A significant proportion of workers are and have been, looking to switch career tracks in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been an estimated 25% rise in people switching jobs and careers. Whether you’re an employer trying to retain your team or you’re a worker looking at their potential future, the question may remain: why? Here, we’re going to look at a few factors shaking up the working world.

Remote work has become vital

Simply put, those workplaces that are not offering their team the opportunity to work from home should expect that their staff is going to seriously consider making a move to attain it for themselves. The shift towards working from home has been slowly happening and expected to keep growing since even before the pandemic, but now it has become widespread and it is clear that the majority of workers want it to stay, at least for jobs that don’t require manual on-site labor. As such, it’s up to employers to look at ways they can transition to a remote working setup.

Some sectors are offering more promise

For people who find themselves in dead-ends of careers that don’t have the momentum that they want, the options are increasing. This is in part due to the labor shortage, which we will cover later. However, it’s largely due to certain sectors adding jobs post-Covid. Industries like hospitality, manufacturing and online retail are trending ahead of others at the moment, with more positions requiring workers due to changes in the market and consumer habits. As such, a lot of people are finding more freedom to switch their careers than before.

Work-life balance has come to the fore

COVID-19 has been an immensely stressful time for all of us. Even if you personally feel like you have adapted well, you could probably agree and see that the general mood of the public has soured over the past couple of years.

• a lot of people are taking the time to re-evaluate how they spend their time and find that work takes up too much space in their life.
• we have more people switching jobs or quitting work altogether to try and bring some work-life balance that was previously missing.

Worker dissatisfaction is reaching a peak

People are getting more and more frustrated with the stacked deck that is the working world. Stagnating wages have failed to keep up with inflation meaningfully,  zero-hours and other employment trends have dissolved many notions of “fitting” with the workplace, and people are not getting the treatment that they deserve. As such, strikes and “labor shortages” (which are really good job shortages) have become much more common and the anti-work movement has been gaining a lot of traction and may continue to until the imbalance is redressed.

It could be said that the widespread dismay with the working world is long-overdue and that COVID-19 served as a catalyst rather than a cause. However, whatever the reason, the truth is that workers are making moves, and employers need to be ready.