Your Next Job Could Be Your Last for a While. Make It Count.
The job market is getting tougher, and for many workers, finding the right next position has become more important than ever.
Last week’s disappointing jobs report offered more evidence of a labor market that has largely stalled, with both hiring and layoffs remaining unusually low. For people considering a career move, that means there’s less room for mistakes. The next company you join could be where you stay for quite some time, so choosing carefully matters.
To help job seekers make better decisions, the Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation analyzed the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 companies. The research examined six major technology occupations: software engineers, data scientists, software quality assurance analysts and testers, computer systems and security engineers, IT project managers, and IT systems analysts.
The resulting database allows job seekers to compare companies based on three important measures: promotion opportunities, employee retention, and salary performance.
For anyone searching for a new role, it offers a useful way to look beyond the job description and assess whether a company is actually a good place to build a career.
But finding work in today’s market may also require something else: a willingness to reinvent yourself.
For some unemployed workers, staying on their original career path is no longer the best option. Instead, they’re learning new skills, changing industries, or pursuing entirely different types of work.
Business Insider spoke with six people who took unconventional paths after losing their jobs. Unlike the pandemic-era wave of voluntary career changes, many of these workers weren’t simply chasing a new lifestyle. They were responding to a difficult labor market that forced them to reconsider what came next.
For Douglas Craig, a longtime media executive, that meant taking a job guiding people through zipline courses at an aerial adventure park.
Rather than viewing the change as starting over, Craig saw it as a transition toward work that brought him greater happiness and fulfillment.
In a stagnant job market, that kind of flexibility may be exactly what workers need: not necessarily abandoning their experience, but being willing to rethink how and where they use it.