(Updated July 2024)
When weighing major decisions like changing positions or companies, wading through the emotions and pros and cons can be challenging. Especially during times of economic uncertainty, how can you know the right time to make a move?
We spoke with our recruiting team to analyze what factors into making a major decision. From outlining your future goals, to understanding your current position, we’ve collected our best tips on decision making. We recommend doing plenty of research, along with some soul-searching to figure out what is best for you.
Find Your Road Map
One of the most important factors when weighing a potential career move is asking yourself, does this opportunity align with my five-year or ten-year plan? Even if the new role is not a direct move ‘upwards,’ ask yourself if it would contribute to your goals or be a stepping stone for things you want to achieve.
Answering these questions is the beginning of determining whether or not you should take that new opportunity. Not sure where to start? These resources will help slow the hamster wheel in your head to create a personal growth plan and what that may mean to you.
- Read Navigating The Job Search in Tech: Tips for Resilience and Success for tips on jump-starting or re-starting your job search.
- Use BWB’s other resource to dig into your personal growth plan and how to prioritize your values when it comes to career growth.
- Best-selling author Christopher D. Connors summarizes his thoughts on personal growth and five-year planning, with specific examples to get the wheels turning.
- Find career planning templates here, and check out this helpful infographic on identifying your skills and next steps to better asses your career goals.
Assess Your Agency
One noticeable pattern in our conversations with candidates reveals that many people are excited about new opportunities, but hesitant to leave their current team or role. While we have the utmost respect for that sense of loyalty, part of our job is to help our candidate’s asses their upward mobility in their current role.
If your manager has been promising you a promotion or the opportunity to lead a team and it has not happened yet, is it going to? Sometimes we ask candidates if they are comfortable having a conversation with that person to demystify their personal trajectory. These conversations can be nerve-racking certainly, but can also clear the fog around if your current job is actually going to serve you moving forward.
Ultimately, assessing your agency within your current role can help inform your decision making by more honestly reviewing where you are right now. At BWBacon, we try to keep what is best for the candidate at the forefront, helping guide those decisions.
Good Ol’ Pros and Cons
This tried and true method of decision making is one direct way to translate the noise in your head into tangible differentiators between your opportunities. Often times, we feel as though our ‘gut’ should be making our decisions for us, when in reality, it can be just as confused as our logical brain.
Sorting your concerns, worries, questions, and apprehension into categories of pros and cons can reveal an answer you were not expecting. It can also unearth concerns that may be easy to address when discussed with your recruiter. If you end up feeling like the commute is the biggest con, many companies have flexible work policies and are willing to work with candidates they are interested in.
We cannot stress this enough, open communication and transparency when making decisions only elevates the process. Our recruiters are here to make sure all new opportunities are as satisfactory as possible for someone taking the leap.
Don’t Get Too Granular
Finally, while weighing the pros and cons is a way to breakdown individual push and pull factors, we try to help our candidates discover what their biggest “triggers” are, or those baseline motivating factors. If you find yourself incorporating opinions from everyone you know, from your coworkers to your mom to your significant other, you veer away from making this decision based on what you want.
If your ultimate goal is to work remotely for yourself, start your own company, or lead a team, focus on what is the most important to you. How will this new opportunity help or hinder those goals? We understand as fellow humans that we are creatures of habit, and leaving a job can be difficult whether you were happy there or not.
However, prioritizing your future and taking a risk can pay off. As a BWB recruiter put it,
“We feel these emotions and personal ties, but at the end of the day it’s business. If you go through life making career decisions based on feeling bad for someone else or hurting someone’s feelings, that’s not how people are successful. If you’re loyal to someone and you trust them, they’re going to be excited for you if they’re a good mentor.”
The Decision Is Yours
At the end of the day, evaluating any big decision for yourself also comes down to your mindset. Reminding yourself why you were searching for a new position, or why you are interested in this company to begin with can be the catalyst for moving on. Keep in mind that new offers and interviews also reflect how hard you have worked, and that others are interested in the skill-sets you have built.
We encourage anyone working with BWBacon to utilize your recruiter as your sound board. Major life decisions are not easy, and we are here to help!
Here at BWBacon Group, we know and live what you are experiencing as an employer or job seeker in Denver, Boulder, Dallas, San Francisco, New York City or any of the other cities we work in. We believe great recruiting starts and ends with understanding people.
If you have any questions about living, working or playing any of the areas we serve, please contact us. We are happy to help. Seize the day, every day, that’s what we say!
