Unemployed Job Leavers: A Meaningful Gauge of Confidence in the Job Market?
Dream Career News
ezine
by Kent Johnson
http://www.careeradrenaline.com
Issue:
July 20, 2005
Number of Subscribers: 789
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Unemployed Job Leavers: A Meaningful Gauge of Confidence in the Job Market?
Several
years ago, the government did a survey to decide whether
"unemployed job leavers," or workers who leave their
current jobs without having a new job already in place, were an
indication of confidence in the overall job market. What
they discovered is that during times when unemployment is low, more
workers voluntarily leave their jobs, presumably because they're
confident of quickly finding a replacement job. These
unemployed job leavers are in effect an indicator of rising
confidence in the job market, and the economy as a whole. The rationale is that workers would not voluntarily
leave a job and enter into a job search unless they perceived that prospects for a successful
search were quite good. However, on closer
examination, these assumptions may not be totally accurate. A report
done in 1999 examined several issues associated with data on unemployed job leavers collected
each month in the Current Population
Survey (CPS). What the report concluded was that unemployed job leavers may not be a good proxy for
total job leavers, the vast majority of whom
may never pass through the interim stage of
unemployment. It is likely that most job leavers wait until they have found another job before
they leave their old one, or that they leave the
labor force altogether.
Even among those job leavers who are classified in the CPS as unemployed,
some may, indeed, have quit their jobs because they were confident about employment
opportunities. Others, however, may have quit because they had short-term personal
reasons—family obligations or transportation
problems, for example. Still others may have quit because they became dissatisfied with their
job. Many of these situations have little to do with their assessment of employment opportunities.
In
addition, the "job losers" need to be taken into account
when assessing worker confidence. Job losers -- people who lose
their jobs involuntarily -- make up the largest share of the
unemployed. Many of these workers may not find another job for an
extended period of time, and in fact many give up and leave the job
market altogether. In 1999, unemployed job leavers made up only 13.3 percent
of the total unemployed, while the number
unemployed for the other reasons (which also includes new labor force entrants and reentrants)
comprised 86.7 percent. Any change in the job leavers’ share of the
unemployed can reflect, to a large degree, the declines or increases in the other categories of
unemployment. Hence, a change in the share
of the unemployed made up of job leavers
would not appear to be a particularly revealing measure of changes in the willingness of persons to quit their jobs.
In
summary, unemployed job leavers are just a part of the overall
unemployment picture, and not a true indicator of workers confidence
in the job market. There will always be people willing to take the
plunge and leave their current job without having a new job in
place. These are the risk takers in
society. Being willing to take calculated risks is actually a
quality that most highly-successful people possess, from to entrepreneurs
to test pilots to stock brokers. So don't be afraid to take a risk
in your job or career -- just make sure you've thought it through
and you have a plan in place before you submit that resignation
letter.
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Copyright (c) 2005 by Kent Johnson
Author, publisher, career coach
"Helping people realize their dreams one career at a time."
Searching for your dream career? Visit the popular
http://careeradrenaline.com for more info
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