The Great Resignation Paradox

“They’re leaving in droves!” Or so we’re told. My newsfeed is littered with stories proclaiming that The Great Resignation is in full swing. Workers who’ve gotten a taste of remote work are now calling the shots, and if their bosses don’t capitulate, they offer their labor, skills, and experience to someone who will allow them the luxury of working from home.

But how do you explain the fact that my LinkedIn feed is also filled with people who’ve been out of work for the past two years, or who’ve been laid off relatively recently and are also having a hard time finding jobs?

The two seemingly contradictory phenomena are actually two slices of the same pie. Half of the pie might be blueberry and the other half apple, but they’re covered in the same crust.

But enough about pies. Let’s talk about this new generation of workers who, from all appearances, are living the good life.

Some of the more sympathetic articles will include legitimate reasons like lingering concerns about COVID-19, changed family circumstances, and childcare issues when explaining why employers are having such a hard time filling jobs. At least these quitters seem less like spoiled brats when you put it that way. But still.

Let’s admit it — none of us really knew what we were in for when we heard that we had stepped into Lockdown Mode in March 2020. Business owners, managers, workers (and me) all thought we’d be home for a couple of weeks, get some well-deserved rest, make crafts with the kids, and bake bread. And we mostly did those things until it got really old.

Tourism workers probably got hit first and hardest. Travel bans, airport closures, and stay-at-home orders turned ordinary, everyday events into distant memories. Being furloughed for six weeks was one thing, but hearing the word “indefinitely” and seeing people dying by the thousands from an airborne virus was downright scary. It really did seem like we’d never go maskless in public again.

Not to mention healthcare workers who had been physically, mentally, and emotionally drained after collectively witnessing 6 million worldwide deaths caused by the coronavirus.

People baked, cooked, wrote, and created online content for the first time and discovered that their neighbors and friends supported them, or that strangers craved their next YouTube or TikTok video.

But the real thing that happened was this: they discovered that they liked doing it.

And that’s where the two sets of individuals converged. The ones whose jobs suddenly allowed them to work from home (which they had wanted to do all along, but were told was impossible), and the ones who had to learn to do something else because they (or their job) couldn’t work online. Now that everything has opened up again, people are giving their bosses the ol’, “Nah, I’m good,” and this is sending pundits into a mini-panic about what exactly is going on as employers struggle to fill jobs.

So where are all the jobs?

That’s well and good, you point out, but something isn’t quite adding up if I can’t find a job.

Actually, we’re in the middle of something bigger than a “Great Resignation”. What’s happening is more of a fantastic lesson in societal learning and change.

Organizations are made up of people. These people are individuals who observe, think, and strategize. Decision-makers or their friends and family members have been directly or indirectly affected by COVID, and that influenced their perception of what businesses need to do to survive.

While stage actors and event coordinators were busy teaching English to kids in China, their cousin who is a business owner was busy learning that their businesses had to pivot too. For instance, printing companies invested less heavily in hardcopy printing and realized that digital marketing was an avenue that their former printing clients were now heavily into. If they wanted to stay afloat, they had to decide whether to give up that revenue to a marketing agency or get with the program and offer digital products and services themselves.

Big-name universities couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. If you forced students back into the classroom against their will, they would simply attend a distant university that offered the same degree, at a lower cost, from the comfort of their homes.

Individuals, organizations, and societies learned about transferable skills in a big way due to COVID-19.

The result, of course, is that a couple of printing press operators and campus residence administrators are now out of a job. And they’re having a hard time getting another one back. They have tons of experience and great recommendations, so where are all the jobs?

You got it: they no longer exist. Or rather, they don’t look the same way they did. These jobs are now disguised under different titles. Whether companies call it restructuring, layoffs, or redundancies, two years of uncertainties have taught business owners that there are no guarantees and that they have to be able to change directions at short notice.

So short of going out there and actually getting qualified in a whole new skill area, workers also need to realize that they can pivot, adapt, and skill-transfer to a new job, sometimes in an entirely different industry, using skills they already have with relatively slight variations.

That explains why so many acting professionals started tutoring English to Chinese students when they themselves couldn’t speak a lick of Mandarin. With only a bit of tweaking (via a short certification course), they were able to transfer their acting skills into the Total Physical Response method of language learning.

Remember the printing company that started doing digital marketing? They already had the design skills in-house (graphic artist breathes a sigh of relief) and now need to hire a social media strategist. See where this is going? They’re gonna have a hard time filling that new role because social media strategists are in high demand. It gets more interesting when you realize that the new worker won’t even need to come into the office. We have a global employee marketplace, so the next hire could be from Bangalore, Nairobi, or Sydney.

Meanwhile, the printing press operator doesn’t realize that with all his training and experience in precision and detail, he is a great candidate for a quality inspection role.

Remember what we said earlier? Pieces of the same pie.

We’ve all just witnessed a sudden shift in skills demand.

So if you find yourself asking where all the jobs are, start thinking more creatively about the skills you’ve acquired and, for the love of everything that is good and pure, update your resume so it makes sense to your potential employer.