Why communicators leave their jobs

Internal and external communicators are still looking for greener pastures, with 16% planning to make a move in the next year, an increase of 5 percentage points over the previous year’s findings, with an additional 36% considering a change. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they had already switched jobs in the last year, nearly double the previous year’s results.

But the motivations for changing jobs are changing versus previous years.

One notable uptick in our survey is the number of communicators who aren’t leaving their positions of their own free will. Eight percent of those who had left their jobs in the last year did so because they were laid off or let go — a big jump from just 2% the previous year.

While the overall unemployment rate remains historically low, layoffs have hit some sectors, notably tech.

We saw one other big year-over-year shift in reasons for leaving one job for another: burnout. One of the key words of the stressful pandemic era, 24% of those who left jobs in our last survey round did so because of burnout. This year, that number fell to just 11%.