Why are people leaving the corporate world in droves?

There’s appeal in alternative career journeys

HS Burney
WorKit
Published in
3 min readJul 19, 2022

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Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash

An interesting phenomenon has hit financial services.

People are leaving. Fast and furious.

Some of it is the usual job-hopping for more money, traversing institutions like an expert skier navigating an obstacle track. Some of it is people with young families leaving to escape the pressure and look for slower-paced jobs with smaller companies.

But it’s also senior leaders going off on sabbatical, with lukewarm intention of returning. It is executives fleeing to become entrepreneurs.

There was Janet who took a sabbatical to focus on her side business — an all-local coffee house by the water. Since abandoning her high-powered job at the bank, she has grown her business to three locations.

There was Sam who left to help his wife build up her dental practice — within months of embarking on his sabbatical, Sam hired three dentists and signed a lease for a second location.

And then there was Dean who leveraged his connections as a banker to start up his own brokerage firm, bringing two of his colleagues along on the journey. And let’s not forget Sarah, who just got her life coaching certificate.

A career as a leader in financial services was once considered the pinnacle of achievement. So what has changed?

Intensifying demands and multiple competing priorities

Financial services is a rapidly changing industry with new non-traditional competitors emerging every day. Apple and Google want to be banks. Brazen fintech upstarts are storming the stage. To add to it, the pandemic and the resulting financial upheaval and declining interest rates have squeezed profit margins further.

This means that senior leaders in financial services are constantly being asked to take on more and more. Do more with less. Make a dollar go further.

Having a core focus and mission is great but it gets diluted when you continue to add priorities to it. Many of us feel that we are constantly on the back foot.

A lack of control

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HS Burney
WorKit

Currently writing about whatever strikes my fancy whenever