How Do You Know When to Change Jobs?
March 28, 2013
One of the hardest things about a job is knowing when to leave it. How do you know when it’s time to leave a company? There are obvious signs, but the two most important are if you're no longer learning and if you're no longer having fun. The tough part is realizing when those two things have happened. Frequently we are all too close to the situation to see the forest for the trees, to take a step back and objectively evaluate if we're at the right job at the right company at a particular time in our lives.
I’ve left three jobs in my career: I left investment banking (Goldman Sachs) to go into private equity investing (TPG Capital); I left private equity to co-found a startup (Hotwire); and I left online travel (Expedia) to help found another startup (Zillow). In each of those three career transitions, one person was indispensible in pushing me in the right direction: my wife. In each case, she saw something that I couldn’t – she saw that I was unhappy at work. She’s what I call my “career mirror”, someone who sees things about you which you can’t. Your career mirror can be a friend, a spouse, a partner, a parent, a sibling, a life coach or a psychiatrist. Pretty much the only person it can’t be is you.
If you don’t have a career mirror, get one. And once you have one, follow that person’s advice.
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