Millennials Are Quitting Jobs Over Pandemic Stress...With No Plan 'B'
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, September 3rd. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. The pandemic has been rough on workers. Long hours working from home, endless Zoom calls, and a blurring of work and life boundaries that resulted in burnout for a lot of people. For some millennials who've been in the workforce for a bit over a decade, that burnout has boiled over to the point where they've decided to quit with no plan B in place.
I think the kind of workday creep and explosion of people's job descriptions also contributed to this and made people a little bit hesitant to find another role when they were already so burned out and dissatisfied in a present role.
Coming up, we'll chat more with The Wall Street Journal's at-work columnist Krithika Varagor about millennials who've had it with the stresses of pandemic work life. And we'll meet one 33-year-old woman who recently up and left her dream job with no current plans to look for something new. That's after the break.
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What context opens the episode about pandemic-driven resignations?
We've talked on the show before about how the pandemic has changed the working world and how U.S. workers are quitting their jobs at some of the highest rates in years. Today, we're taking a deeper look and focusing on millennials, young professionals who started entering the workforce about 15 years ago and some who are quitting their full-time jobs without immediate plans to move to another. In a moment, we'll speak with a woman from Washington, D.C., who did just that. But first, WSJ At Work columnist Krithika Varagor joins us to discuss the trend. Krithika, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for having me on.
So, you know, Krithika, we've talked a lot on the show about how people are leaving their jobs at a high rate. But why are people, especially young people early in their career, why are they quitting with nothing to fall back on?
Well, a lot of young people, and we're not talking about the youngest members of the workforce, so it's not really Gen Z, but, you know, solid middle of the road millennials in their late 20s and early 30s who maybe have a few years of work experience under their belt and some savings in the bank. are in a pretty good position to hit pause instead of just jumping immediately into another career. A lot of them felt burned out during the pandemic at their old job and realized how hard it is to leave once you're locked into a full time role. So they're not in a rush to get into another one. And they have various reasons for this. But part of it is definitely optimism about the record number of job openings and the overall
you know, more favorable labor market for workers than we had last year.
Yeah, you know, the pandemic has really upended what we've known as the workplace.
Absolutely. And I think reporting this story made me realize that more than ever before. And it's had such a long tail. People are responding to burnout they faced maybe a year ago, more than a year ago today by doing things like quitting so they could focus on a new job search in a totally new field full time, or maybe quitting so they can focus full time on their creative goals like writing or something like that.
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