3 Keys To Remember When You Resign
退職する時の注意点

While staying in a single company for your entire career is no longer the norm, there are still certain manners and traditions that you must navigate to keep your reputation when leaving a company.

1 Month Notice – Many companies include a 1-2 month notice for resignation. Also, managers may pressure you to stay 2-3 months in order to find your replacement and hand off work. However, legally you are only required to give 14 days notice. It is always important to remember this if a company tries to pressure you to stay longer. 

That being said, if you are remaining within the industry it is well worth negotiating with your manager to a timeline that leaves everyone satisfied.

When to give your resignation notice – You should always wait until you have received back a signed contract from your next company BEFORE giving notice of resignation for 2 reasons. The first is leaving your role before you have found your next step, assuming that an opportunity will come up. It can take up to 2-4 months o average to find a new role and receive an offer. Not to mention, there is nothing worse than having to take a WORSE job that your previous one because it was the only option you had as you ran out of time or funds. 

The second case happens when you have been told you would receive the job but haven’t actually signed a contract yet. We have seen people leave their company assuming everything was fine, only for the Overseas HQ to suddenly close the headcount and cancel the offer. Until you have signed the contract and received it back, it is not set in stone.

Sharing information about why you are leaving or specifics about your next step – Simply put, nothing good can come from this. Ultimately your manager will be evaluated on the fact that they lost a staff and they may also truly want you to stay. So it is not unusual for them to try to persuade you by trying to convince you that things will change, poke holes in your logic, or in the worst cases, contact your next company to spread bad rumors.

At the end of the day you have already made your decision – if you are resolute and confident it is the correct one, neither you nor your manager gain anything from arguing about it.

The best course is to politely (and hopefully honestly) tell your manager how important your time with them has been, that you appreciate all they have done to help you grow, but that you have decided it is time to move on to your next step. 

If your manager strongly wants to know where you will be going you can reply that you had to agree to confidentiality with your new company until you join, but that after you join, you would love to catch up and update them about your new role.

There is a lot more that goes into leaving a role that you have built a career in, but hopefully you will have a slightly easier time by keeping these 3 keys in mind!