How to Quit Your Job

It's no secret that bad feelings about your job rarely stay confined to the workplace. And considering that Americans quit more than 32 million jobs just last year, it's likely that you too have suffered in a kick-the-cat job. Whether you're an entry-level starter or a mid-level careerist, learning how to approach a tough job situation -- and how to bail out -- is an important experience to have in your professional toolkit.

Just a few months before graduating from an elite New England college, Katie (who asked that her last name not be used) landed a plum entry-level post at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank where new analysts right out of school can make well over $100,000 and where overall compensation topped $622,000 per employee last year.

It was "a job most people would kill for," she says.

But from day one, the former creative writing major felt that sinking sensation that comes when you know you've committed the cardinal career miscalculation: Taking a job you have no interest in.

"I hated going every day -- I'd just be so depressed," says Katie, 23. "Imagine spending 12 hours a day on something you just don't care about and actually having to produce stuff."

She started in September, and by October, was fed up with living "on a leash": Her 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. workdays left her no time to have a life. By November, she says she knew she wanted to be out before Christmas. After three months of work, it had become abundantly clear: "I kind of missed the boat," she says. "Genuinely, you really do have to be interested in the material, and I just really wasn't."

Worse, that material couldn't have been a farther cry from the work she really wanted to do, which was writing. Katie had been an enthusiastic writer in college, but she was temporarily turned off to related careers after a lackluster radio internship her senior year.

"I wasn't a bad analyst. I did my job. I just hated it," she says.

Quitting was probably the right move for Katie, according to industrial and organizational psychologist David Dickter, who says that if the nature of the work or the company is to blame for your unhappiness, the situation probably can't be remedied without a move.

"If your day-to-day is making you miserable, your long-term prospects are not going to be much better," he says. "You have to be able to think, is this something that you can change? That you are empowered to change?"

In Katie's case, her fundamental lack of interest in the work was non-negotiable. She decided to take a $38,000 pay cut and moved one step closer to satisfaction when she took a job at an academic publishing house, where she manages the making of books as a production editor.

"The salary is like unbelievably bad," Katie says. “I told my mom and she told me I might as well work at Taco Bell."

Still, she says, it was the right move, and she's happier for it.

A career change remains a big deal, even though workers nowadays often have four or five different occupations, and many more jobs. Tom Stern, an executive recruiter and Fast Company expert blogger, advises prospective career switchers to research other occupations carefully before making a major change. Volunteering, freelancing, networking and informational interviews are all good supplements to online research.

"You have to always be wary of the grass-is-greener factor -- you may just want to escape where you are rather than truly move to something better," Stern says. "You don't want to be a rebound career person."

Now taking summer writing classes on the side, Katie says she's looking to get published and is considering another career swap into teaching.

But let's say you think you do have an idea of what you're signing up for; you've weighed the pros and cons, and with an eye toward advancing your career, you decide to take a not-so perfect job on what may be the path to career nirvana.

That's what happened to Kathryn, 24, who thought she knew what to expect when she took her first job as a personal assistant to a magazine design director. She had experience in art and the newspaper in college, and says she was prepared to pay her dues, even if her ground-floor job involved a fair share of coffee fetching.

"Someone said [that] maybe in the turn of the century people had domestic servants, and now they have assistants. It's kind of true --[my boss] just used me," Kathryn says. "My daily job consisted of what she came up with in the shower that day."

It didn't take long for Kathryn to become fed up with performing mindless tasks for her boss. Boredom and depression set in.

"It was very Devil Wears Prada," she recalls.