Why are so many people signing up to the 'Quitters' Club' now?
They said: Take your time, think about it; youve just come off two weeks off with burn-out, youre probably not thinking straight.  However, she replied: Im thinking the straightest I have in a long time.  Fewer outgoings during lockdown emboldened Curran to walk away from her salary. It removed a lot of the fear when I was first starting out. Now a freelance copywriter earning more and working less, she says her decision to quit wasnt a logical one, but it made so much sense to me.  Curran is among a swathe of workers who have quit jobs in lockdown. In the US, the latest figures show four million people left jobs in April alone, and at each end of the pay scale. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants and bars, around five quit, while 700,000 white collar workers left their jobs, constituting the highest monthly figure ever. In what seems to be the start of a global trend, a recent Microsoft Index found that more than 40 per cent of the global workforce is considering quitting this year, and in the UK, one study heralded a talent exodus on the horizon. Software company Personio recently found 38 per cent of employees are looking to change roles in the next six to 12 months. Reasons for quitting vary, from people who have felt bolstered by lockdown savings and taken a risk, to the relocators who fled city life and set up somewhere new, and the job switchers restarting their careers. Gary Lowery, who quit a stable, well-paid job in engineering last month to retrain as a teacher, is trepidatious about the pay cut but hopeful that quitting before hes 40 will mean he can have a good shot at a second half of a career. Im going to have to get quite high up in the teaching career to match the salary that I was on, says Lowery, a 39-year-old father of two from Halifax. But the salary and the career path arent everything.  Lowery had always wanted to teach but that ambition didnt come into focus until he experienced lockdown: The pandemic hit and we were classified as key workers because we supplied the power in the defence sector. It was pretty tough.  Burn-out is a big driving factor, particularly as unpaid overtime in the UK has shot up, with the ADP Research Institute recently revealing UK employees are now working an average of 9.2 hours a week overtime (up nearly two hours a week since 2019), equating to 219 billion in free labour annually. In June, the US-based dating app Bumble shut for a week to give its 700-odd employees a much needed break, with its head of content Clare OConnor tweeting that Whitney Wolfe Herd, the apps self-made billionaire founder, had correctly intuited our collective burn-out. OConnor, who later deleted the post, called the policy a big deal in the US, where vacation days are notoriously scarce.  For many, theres a desire to be in charge of their own working environments. One study, by professional services consultancy Barnett Waddingham, revealed a third of employees could quit post-lockdown if their organisation doesnt allow them to work from wherever they choose. In white collar jobs, then, the relationship between employer and employee may have fundamentally changed. Justin Small, CEO of the Future Strategy Club, a network of UK consultants, says: the power has shifted, adding: Employers dont have the rationale now to say you cant work from home. The top talent are able to really dictate terms. Goldman Sachs is saying its absolutely not going to change. Will they lose out on a lot of talent going to companies who are saying yes, you can work three days in the office?  Emily Austen, CEO of PR firm Emerge, says a glamourisation of the benefits of working from home is driving people to quit. Theres been quite a quick amnesia about the challenges, she says, adding that while duty of care is still the most important thing as an employer, it is much easier to take care of peoples mental health when you can see them. Three of her small team left after buying houses outside London in lockdown, a trend that is set to hit the capital in the wake of the pandemic; PwC is forecasting that Londons population will decline (by around 300,000) for the first time in more than 30 years, driven by the economic fallout from lockdown and people reassessing where they want to live. Prospective employees, Austen says, now want more flexibility. Ive interviewed about 30 people in the past month. All of them are like What can the business do for me?  Its really not enough to have a salary and drinks on a Friday and full-time HR support, lovely office, free gym membership. Theres a whole stack of other things in terms of expectations.  Small says that while being on staff used to be seen as the thing for security, now, people are looking to the freelance market for a sense of job safety. The most amount of businesses in history have been created this year. Theres a lot of innovation happening.