Summer break inspires City slickers to switch careers for a job in the sun
Two weeks in a tropical paradise is seemingly enough to tempt even the richest City slickers into packing it all in to become a surf instructor, as apparently over 50 per cent of UK workers seriously consider a career change immediately after the summer holidays.
After returning from a summer break, one in two workers are more likely to look for a new job than they were previously.
This could be down to the shift from sipping pina coladas to pencilling in meetings, as one third told a recent survey that they felt their bosses put too much pressure on staff to get back into the flow of work.
Adam Nicoll at global recruiters FiveTenGroup told The Capitalist that March and September were times of big change for many City workers.
He said: “We see a very marked seasonality to our hiring activity. The reason for this is that people appear to make key life decisions, very often off the back of the few occasions in the year when they get genuine lengthy episodes of time to introvert and reflect; most notably those occasions are Christmas and the big summer holiday.”
In fact, Nicoll says that recruitment in March and September can rise up to an average of 40 per cent compared with the rest of the year.
The recent survey, conducted by CV Library, also claimed that stress at work is a never-ending struggle, with over 75 per cent of workers claiming their job is always on their mind when taking a summer break.
Although the mental image of flip-flop hating Barclays chairman John McFarlane heading to the job centre to retrain as a surfing instructor will never get old, FiveTenGroup said that holidays give people time to re-evaluate their “levels of enjoyment and sense of purpose”. One can always dream…