Friday, January 15, 2010

Getting Your Dream Job... And Taking A Job Away

One of my best friends just got his dream job as the Program Assistant for Communications and New Media at the Morehead Foundation, working back on the same college campus where he spent his undergrad years writing for The Daily Tar Heel as if it were his full-time job. He really is perfect for the position and he's incredibly happy being back in an academic atmosphere. As happy as he is though, he's incredibly modest and one of those do-gooder givers more so than a receiver.

For nearly two years prior to this dream job he was working at a generic 9-5 law firm. While he obviously left the position there for one which better suited his skills and passions, it was still a perfectly good paying job that many others would have been extremely happy to take. Except nobody had the opportunity to take the job that he left because the company decided not to replace him.

For my friend this was unsettling. He went to pursue a dream job and in the process took another job out of the economy. In his words, "That's one less family to put food on the table."

Now I would predict that this is happening fairly often these days. Employers have employees that they may not want to lay off necessarily, but if the employee leaves on their own accord, the employer feels financial pressure not to refill the position. So every time someone leaves for another position or leaves to freelance, they are ultimately taking jobs out of the economy.

Now I'm not an economist by any means, but it would seem that if employers would just start replacing those who leave, things would start to look up again.


Have you left a position that your employer didn't end up refilling? Do you think your employer would need to replace your position if you left (hypothetically)? Knowing that young entry-level Gen-Y's are so unsatisfied with their current jobs and having heard that many Gen-Y's left their jobs recently, do you think Gen-Y is partly responsible for the lack of entry-level positions?

1 comment:

  1. This ties into the concern that as hiring begins to pick up, folks that have been laid off could be at the back of the line for being rehired.

    Employers are often more inclined to hire someone away from a current job, or hire a newly-minted graduate, than to pick up someone with a chunk of time missing from their resume. There's nothing fair about this, especially in a recession that has seen an enormous number of perfectly qualified people laid off for absolutely no fault of their own, but it's the reality that a lot of unemployed folks will be facing in the coming months.

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