By Noah Leavitt, director of the Career and Community Engagement Center
Today, Valentine’s Day, offers a moment to reflect on what we love.
From the vantage point of the Career and Community Engagement Center, there is one thing right now that is very easy to love: the extraordinarily favorable economy for students looking to enter the work world in 2022.
You may have heard it called “The Great Resignation” or “The Great Reorganization” or one of many other pieces of language that have emerged to capture the historic nature of the transition of large numbers of people out of their jobs and organizations and professions. While some economists and scholars note that this process likely began pre-COVID-19 the pandemic has wildly accelerated the pace and scale of the movement. This paragraph from a recent Korn-Ferry newsletter provides a helpful sense of the historic scope of this social change:
“During the Great Resignation, the ‘quit rate,’ or the number of voluntary resignations as a percentage of employment, has increased for healthcare providers, retailers and nearly every other form of business. The rate, as of January 2022, was 2.9%, the second-highest reading since the federal government started tracking the number in 2000. (The highest rate was 3%, reached in December). In 2021, there were more than 40 million instances of Americans telling their bosses, ‘I quit,’ a record…”
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