Skip to main content

U.S. workers itching for a chance to change jobs

NEW YORK, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Most U.S. workers are ready to tell their bosses to take a hike and hop to a new job at the first real sign of a pickup in the job market, a survey conducted by an employment Web site found.


But while some two-thirds of respondents to the survey by a unit of college loan provider Sallie Mae  indicated they're waiting for a chance to change jobs, many also said they value long-term employment with a single company.

Still, nearly 40 percent of respondents expect to leave their current employer within a year, according to the survey of 200 job seekers conducted in January by TrueCareers.

Those who want to score a bigger paycheck and take on more responsibility make up 46 percent of the group who expect to switch jobs when the economy improves. Twenty-five percent are looking to change fields, the survey found.

"More than one-third of respondents say that they have been passively searching for a new job," Cecelia Dwyer, president of TrueCareers, said in a statement. "Employers that are not doing enough to retain good personnel may lose valuable assets as the economy improves and new jobs are created."

But employers shouldn't expect mass defections quite yet. U.S. consumer confidence tumbled in February from January, as Americans took a dimmer view of the economy, mainly because of a lack of new jobs, data released on Tuesday by private research firm The Conference Board showed.

Also, despite looking for opportunities to change jobs now, most respondents said they prefer staying with one employer for at least five to seven years. Half of survey respondents said they'd prefer to spend the majority of their career with one company.

TrueCareers, a job board aimed at workers with college degrees, is a unit of Reston, Virginia-based Sallie Mae..

(c) Copyright Reuters 2004. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

You are receiving this Complimentary Monitoring transmission at no charge, as a benefit of your organization's membership with PR Newswire.  If you would like to stop receiving Complimentary Monitoring transmissions, please reply to this email with your request.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Job Stress Symptoms

Quite often job stress can cause physical symptoms which many people don't realize as work related. Migraine headaches, stomach problems, back problems, heart problems, and other ailments can be caused by stress on the job. For most, a visit to their family doctor is the first step that is appropriate. However, a person who is suffering job stress should realize that his/her health is being affected by problems on the job. Physicians sometimes do not diagnose stress as the contributing factor or the cause of physical ailments. Patients often don't tell their doctor what stress they are experiencing and so the underlying problem goes undiagnosed. Stress can cause some very real physical reactions in our bodies. Anxiety or Panic attacks are the best example. Seemingly out of nowhere, a person experiences a racing heart beat, tightness in the chest, dizziness, sweaty hands and dry mouth, and a feeling of disorientation. People who suffer panic attacks will quickly tell you that ...

What if? Employee loneliness in the workplace affects productivity. How to deal with it?

Employee loneliness in business can occur at any level in an organisation, and the effect on productivity is just as noteworthy at all levels too. Whilst traditionally academic studies have used the elderly as a focus of research on loneliness (there being obvious qualitative data on the subject) and also the sphere of private lives in general (the implicit believe being that it’s a non-work issue), there have been a handful of studies in more recent years

So Don't Call It Networking

Any career services professional will tell you that networking is the single most important job search activity. Indeed, outplacement companies and career counselors hold seminars and workshops devoted just to this subject. But no matter how much we say so, it seems many job seekers hate to network and prefer to spend their time sending out resumes or cruising job sites on the Internet. I realize now that the newly unemployed often misunderstand the networking concept. Because networking is encouraged by the career consultant, individuals tend to view it as a skill specific to the job hunt, and not a widely-applicable, if not essential, work or life skill. Some people dismiss networking as a purely mechanistic process, while others avoid it because they think it's phony or inauthentic. At best, many individuals network just out of necessity and then forget all about it once they're re-employed. So if it will do any good, don't call it networking. If it just conjures up nega...