You’ve had enough. You can’t handle your job anymore and you want to quit.
Don’t do it. Not if you live in Australia and you haven’t secured a new job, that’s for sure.
On Monday 23rd February the ABC Four Corners program The Jobs Game revealed the true state of unemployment in Australia. I don’t know about you, but despite all my education and experience I have always struggled to make sense of the reported unemployment figures. On the 12th of February, The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported that Australia’s unemployment rate was 6.4 %, a rise of 0.1 percent since December 2014.
What does an unemployment rate of 6.4% mean? In all honesty I can’t tell you and I haven’t been able to find a definition that is clear enough to share with you.
What I can tell you is that according to the ABS, 795,200 people are looking for work. The ABC Four Corners Program revealed that there are only 150,000 jobs available in Australia.
Ratios I can understand. This means that there are, on average 5.3 unemployed Australians looking for each available job. Why isn’t unemployment reported as a ratio of job seekers to jobs available?
Surely it is much easier for the average person to understand what that means, versus a figure such as 6.4%. I don’t know about you, but the figure 6.4% doesn’t represent the reality of the unemployment situation anywhere near as clearly as 5.3 people looking for each job. And that’s only an average. Clearly some jobs will have higher ratios.
Perspective matters. If more people understood the reality of the Australian unemployment situation then I believe that more people would be taking action to create more jobs, because clearly more jobs is what we need. In addition, more people will think twice about quitting their job.
If you are thinking about quitting your job, make sure that you have secured another job before you resign. Create a plan and treat your job hunting as a project. Above all else, don’t quit if you don’t have a job to go to. Not now. It just isn’t the smart thing to do.
