When do you know it's time to leave your job?

I thought this article was interesting, and relevant to young professionals. How do you know when it's time to leave? Read on...

Wrong Job, Move On!
How do you know when it's time to leave your job? When you begin laughing at your supervisors.
by Susan Marie Groppi
At my last job, I knew the time had come to leave when I laughed out loud at my supervisor during a meeting. He'd called a few of us together to explain a new office initiative. "It's going to mean some changes for how we do things," he said, "but I think it can be very positive for us, very exciting."

I couldn't help it. I just started laughing. He had used those exact same words so often, usually to prepare us for some large-scale project in which our department did all of the work and another department got all of the credit. This time, everything just seemed so ridiculous - especially the fact that he really expected us to think this new project was positive and exciting, when experience so clearly showed that it would be neither. Something had to change. The department wasn't going to change and management was unlikely to depart, so it was clearly time for me to leave.

Not everyone lands in the right job right out of school. There must be people who find the jobs of their dreams straight after graduation -- I even know one or two of them - but they're the exceptions, not the rule. Most of us have to take a few tries, make a few mistakes, and figure it out bit by bit as we go along. A job that looks great may turn out different than advertised, and even a job that's right for you at first may no longer be ideal as you change and your life changes. The important thing is to recognize when you're in the wrong situation and find a way out of it.

One common sign that you and your job aren't well matched is when you just can't make it to work at any reasonable hour. Everyone is delayed sometimes; everyone has mornings when the alarm clock is the enemy. It's only a problem when it becomes a pattern when every morning you're finding, as one friend of mine did, an endless string of things to do rather than go to work. If you're vacuuming the living room, watching cartoons, baking cookies, waxing your car, or even staring at the walls just to avoid facing another morning at the office, you're clearly not in the right place.

Sometimes the problem is larger, though. What if you're not only in the wrong job, but the wrong line of work? It happens, more often than you might think. It's very easy upon graduation to take the path of least resistance, to accept the job you know you can do well rather than the one that challenges you. It's easy to misjudge your interests, or to need more time to find the path that's right for you.

So how do you know when you need a bigger change than just a new job? There are a few easy signs; if you have a particular interest outside of work that consistently holds your attention better than your job does, for instance. If you've had a string of bad employment experiences in your field, you're probably in the wrong field.

The best thing to do is to write a list of things you don't like in your current job. If they're mostly things that are likely to be different with a new employer (shorter commute, higher salary, different management structure), then you probably don't have a problem with the field that you're in. But if your list includes a lot of elements that aren't specific to your present job - if you want to be doing something more creative, for example - then you might need to start thinking about an entirely different track.

Keep in mind that it's okay to switch jobs - if you didn't know at twenty-one or twenty-two what you wanted to do with the rest of your life, that's fine. It's never too late to make a change. Whether you got it right on the first try (or second or third) isn't important; what's critical is that you find something that helps you triumph over the alarm clock most days because you can't wait to get to work.