The illusion of the perfect job

As we start to come out of COVID, we are being warned of “The Great Resignation”. The main issue fueling this is an illusion which has been around forever. Everyone has an idea of what their “perfect job” would be. There are numerous problems with this illusion.

Most people do not have a good objective view of their skills and experience. There is a huge difference between convincing yourself you can do a job and convincing someone else. Many people do not take into account the importance of skills which they do not possess. Older workers have the reverse of this problem. Everyone might agree an older worker can do a job in their sleep. But there are other forces in play. The company might not see the benefit in the same way as the worker. Being overqualified is not always a good thing.

What are your top three employee job dissatisfactions?

What the person sees as the “perfect job” never exists. Issues will always arise – after the move. People do not ask enough questions or do enough research. They also do not realize they are being “recruited”. Lastly, but most importantly, organizational priorities change. Some of the top reasons convincing the employee to move will evolve or disappear. I know of certain friends who took new jobs recently. The amount of remote work has changed three times in three months. In this case, the organization is still figuring out what post-COVID looks like.

What can you do to minimize your employee’s dissatisfactions?

One of the other trends is the younger generations opening their own businesses. They have dreams and illusions of vast wealth. My friends and I talk about how we have started our businesses with 30+ years of corporate executive experience. The first problem is the word “corporate”. Start up and corporate are light years apart. Some of our skills were totally irrelevant. We all look back and are awed at how much we have learned. Some of this education has been learned by trial and error. All of it has been very expensive in terms of time and money.

Most of the younger generations do not have our years of experience and knowledge. The disillusionment for the younger generations will set in as their businesses are not unqualified successes. It will be crushing to them. The disillusionment will be the same for a job that does not work out. I believe there will be a Great Disillusionment soon after the Great Resignation.

How can we help remove your areas of employee dissatisfactions?