The Great Resignation with Kanika Tolver

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All right, you're listening to another episode of the CTO Advisor. We're going back and talking to the speakers from the CTO Advisor virtual conference from 2020. We promise we'll do another virtual conference in 2022. But this is some self-love and self-care podcasting today. We have with us Kanika Tolver, author and founder of Career Rehab. Kanika, good talking to you again. Hey, how you doing? Nice to talk to you again too, Keith. We've been trying to get this going for a few weeks now, and I finally grabbed you.

You like the moonlight, I like to say. You have a job you're dating, and we'll talk about dating jobs in a little bit. You have a job you like to date, and today was a way for you to get away from that dating relationship. How's that going for you? My dating relationship is actually good. I work at the Department of Treasury, I'm a senior project manager where I focus on managing a lot of projects for ServiceNow. So today's my day off.

So today I am not dating the job, I'm going to be going on a date with my husband. Oh, nice. I remember when I used to do that with my wife. Yeah. We should do it again. I'm trying to get, for those who are listening to this way after the fact, today is the first day of KubeCon US held in LA, and I decided at the last minute to go to KubeCon. It is a little bit different of a world for me.

I've tried to convince my wife, Melissa, to come with me, but she wants no part of a four and a half hour flight to LA for some reason. I want to go up to LA too, but it's like five hours from where I'm at, and with this whole COVID stuff, I'm not ready to fly long. It's not a pleasant experience. Not too bad, but it's not, I wouldn't call it in. Flying has never been enjoyable. So flying during a pandemic is probably, as you can imagine, less enjoyable.

Yes. Speaking of pandemic, there's this thing going around, and since you're a careers expert, I'm pretty sure you're familiar with it, and you can probably inform me about it a little bit more, called the great resignation. What is all of this about? I'm going to say we use that term. I refer to it as the fearless resignation, but from my understanding is the great resignation is that in this particular period of time that we're in with this pandemic, a lot of people are resigning from their jobs.

I don't have the actual statistics, so I'm not going to give you any inaccurate data on how many professionals are resigning their jobs, but from what I hear is a lot of people are not excited about going back to the office. They're considering resigning if they do, and people are just optimistic at this point. They are really more focused on being open to new opportunities. For me, in my book, I talk about the fearless resignation because I encourage people, resignations are never great, but they definitely should be done fearlessly.

When we're in relationship with jobs, we have to get up enough courage to fearlessly resign from a job. When they use great, not sure where they're coming from, I guess with the Great Depression and some of the other eras and dispensations, people use the word great, but I don't think resignations are never really great unless you're going to a better opportunity. We'll talk about that. I just did a quick Google and the Harvard Business Review has a couple of numbers. Four million Americans quit their jobs as of July 2021.

Between the age groups of 30 and 45, which I'm no longer part of that age group, so I guess they're not talking to me exactly. They're seeing a 20% increase in 2020 and 2021 of this age group. Is this something that you think is indicative? Without digging into the numbers yourself, intuitively, is this something indicative of that age group? Is this age group that a lot of people move around in general? I'm in that age group. I would say that is a combination of people that are Gen Xers and Gen Y.

Those are people that's on the cuff for Gen Y and then those, I'm sorry, those are people that are on the cuff of people that are Gen Y folks and Gen Xers because a lot of us probably are more closer to the Gen Xer in that age group. I think people are just fed up. People are trying to figure out what they really want to do and the pandemic has given people an opportunity to probably have more time to think about that. I like to consider that age group in my book, the corporate rebels.

I have like three personas that I talk about in career rehab. Why are they rebels? The corporate rebels are people that have more than five or 10 or 15 years of work experience, but they're at a point in their life where they figure out that they really are not happy. They're not happy with their opportunities that they've been presented and are happy in their current career situations and they are ready to go against the grain. They're ready to either do a career change, try new things, or find an organization that's a good personality fit.

I think a lot of people have spent a lot of times in toxic work relationships and the great resonation is just a sign of that people are fed up and tired. If they're resigning and they're like, most of us are working from home, if they're resigning and they're working from home, that tells you even more indicator that something's not going right at their job because we should be happy that we're at home technically, right? A lot of us are not commuting. A lot of us are not in traffic or on trains or buses, so if people are resigning, it may just be a lot of stress at home or it may be stress with the job.

You know what, we're in a similar age group. I'm a little bit older than you, I'm a generation Xer and I love this idea of the fearless resignation. Back in 2014 when I was in that 30 to 45 age group where I was the corporate rebel, I did quit my job without having a job, but I had a plan. I want to talk to you about this idea of the fearless resignation. What exactly is that in your book? In the book, I talk about how we have to overcome the fear of being scared to end a career relationship.

A lot of times when we're in these career relationships, we are scared because of financial security. We're scared of what other people are going to think. We're scared what our family is going to think when we're ready to resign. We're scared to even go to a new opportunity if there's an opportunity lined up. I have quit my job without having another job lined up when I was in private sector. It was so liberating because it was kind of like I needed a perk.

I was working, I'm in tech for those that don't know because I know I talk more about career rehab and being an author, but I've been in the technology industry for over 15 years. I actually said, I have enough money saved up to take some time off and I'm going to leave this job. I quit my job and I took a personal sabbatical. I stayed home and I just chilled and I relaxed. I got my mind together and I had a lot of job opportunities coming my way during that time off.

It may have been almost a little under a year that I did not have a job lined up. I had people calling, but I didn't have a job ready to go into. That opportunity was so amazing because I did a lot of soul searching about what I wanted in the next opportunity. Talk to us about getting over that fear factor because some of us aren't quite as fearless. There is a fear factor, even if we have the savings. Obviously, if you're going to quit your job without having a job lined up, suffice it to say, you should be able to afford to do it.

Don't do this if you can't afford to be off for an extended period of time. This is more than just fear. We're mainly talking to the folks who are in a position that either it's via support of a significant other, spouse, savings, you can take the time. We have this traditional speak, and I love your concept of the corporate rebel, but in traditional speak, we're told to always have something lined up. I know my father always told me, don't ever quit a job without having a job.

Is that outdated wisdom? I think it's outdated wisdom for the new generation. I think that it applies to those that know their personal life and their personal situation. But I think when I think about even Gen Z's, the new generation, you got X, Y, Z now. I think that people are really excited about this gig economy. People are saying, hey, I'm willing to work with more short-term projects. I think that was frowned upon to have a short-term gig or maybe to even have a short-term contract or maybe to freelance because that's technically not a job lined up because you're always looking for the next job to be lined up for you.

But I think it goes back to your point. My situation is different because I had a spouse who's also in tech, who has a six-figure job, who put me on his health care plan when I left my job because I had my own health care insurance. I had savings saved up. So I think it is, I wouldn't say that the wisdom is outdated. I just think it's situational. I think if you have kids and family, which I don't, I don't have kids.

My situation is a lot different than somebody who already has an established family. So let's talk about kind of like step two, after you've made the plunge and you've thought through kind of what's next, you've gone on this personal journey and you reenter your dating relationship. And if you guys are not getting the taxonomy, Kanika's book, she talks a lot about dating a job and how it's not necessarily a permanent, like this lifelong relationship you're in anymore. They're meant to be periods of time.

And I highly recommend, we'll put a link to the book on Amazon in the show notes. But as you start to reenter the dating relationship with a job, how should we think about the tough question of, well, what have you done for the past six months? So what I did was I had a company. So I, in that period that I was not working, I used my company as employment history, as experience. And that really helps suffice that question because, or if you feel like you want to answer that question where you feel like, hey, I was on a short term contract, the contract ended, or I was laid off, whatever your situation, because everybody's situation can be different.

Someone could get laid off and not necessarily have another job lined up. That doesn't mean they actually quit, right? I mean, they could have been fired or they could have been laid off or they quit, right? It's like those three, or you resigned, which is quit too. But you could be in three different categories of this fearless resignation that happened for you. You fearlessly had to adopt being laid off. You fearlessly had to adopt quitting, or you just basically was fired due to lack of performance.

So I think it's good to still be doing things in your industry during that period of time. So there's some period of performance there so people can rate you on something, or people are really okay with this whole mental health thing, right? We in a time where employers and organizations are a little bit more, they're okay with people talking about, hey, I just took a personal sabbatical off because I had to take care of a loved one, or I had to take care of my health.

I think that those are good ways to get around that question. Yeah, I just had an interview with Sanjay, former CEO, I mean, COO of VMware, president of SAP. And we talked about it, we were in the park and right outside of Palo Alto, California, we're talking about his time off. And I asked him like, well, Sanjay, someone of your caliber, you got to have something lined up. And he's like, nah, nah, nah, I'm just taking it easy. Opportunities are coming and I'm just not really paying much attention to it, focusing on my family, my mental health, Chad Sackett, family of Dell Technologies, Pivotal Labs.

And before Pivotal Labs, he had a long career at EMC and Dell Tech, and very, very popular and known figure. And he just said, you know what, I'm taking a time out. And I can repeat this story over and over again. And even me, back in 2014, famously, I quit my job without having a job. Some of the people who followed the podcast might have remembered that I worked for PWC, I was burnt out. And I just said, enough, I'm not doing it anymore, I'm going to have a very public job search.

And it worked out for me. Robert, all of those people have something in common that you don't. Both me and you are people of color, which is one thing, but you're a woman. And for women, this can be a sensitive topic, like leaving the workforce, dating a job. Just like dating, you know, men are looked at differently when it comes to dating than women are. So are there any considerations as a woman you should think about when you think about the fearless resignation?

I don't think that it's no different. I think we hastily generalize that women can't do what men do in the corporate world. But I think so many women know that they can, they have amazing personal brands, they have amazing, just like you talked about, you talked about him saying, no, cool, I'm chilling with my family. I got all these opportunities coming. I had Microsoft in my DMs. I had Adobe in my DMs. I had all these Fortune 500 companies, but I was burnt out and I was uninterested in all of those opportunities.

So I think knowing your worth, women should really focus in on knowing what's in it for them. When we're dating jobs, it is friends with benefits. It is friends with benefits. So for women, it's the same way that men, when they're young and they're single, they're dating women and they got a team of women that they're dating and they having friends with benefits. Women should think about it the same way. So I always tell women, especially black women and poor women to understand what do you want out of this career relationship?

What do you want? What is going to make you happy? You know what a toxic relationship feel like in real life with a man or with a woman, but you also know what a toxic relationship looks like for you in the career space. So it's important that we know that we want work life balance. We want a good, a great salary. We want a training budget. We want to be able to take off time when we have a baby.

We want to be able to have good PTO. We want to negotiate additional hours of paid time off. We want to be able to have opportunity to basically use the company's money to do global travel. So I want to travel on their dime the same way a man can fly me out to Miami or to Argentina or to California. I want to do global travel on the company's dime, and I want to explore my experiences through the company's budget. So I think there's so many opportunities when you are dating a job that you can negotiate depending on your role, if you are a consultant or you are a traveling consultant or you someone that goes in to the office every day, there's so many benefits.

I think we look at the job offer as just one piece, but there's a whole list of other benefits that most women who don't even negotiate their annual salary, they're missing out on all of the other things that they can do. So Kenneka, give us the kind of 30 second, 45 second overview of the book. Why should, other than me telling my audience to go out and buy and read the book, why should they go out and buy and read the book? They should go out and read the book because career rehab is all about gutting out the stuff that's not been working well with you and putting in the stuff that will work well for you.

This book is a mindset transformational book. This book is really going to help you understand that you can take back career ownership. You can have the career of your dreams and you can get the money, power, respect by dating jobs. Oh, I love the end on that, that same, because you have a nice east coast access, money and money and the respect. I love that. East coast reference. All right. For those who want to learn more about you and your practice and your philosophies, how can they follow you?

com if you want to hire me for speaking engagements and for coaching. And if you want to purchase the book, career rehab, you can purchase that on at all major book retailers from Amazon to books a million to Mars and nobles to target. And if you want to keep up with me on social media, I'm a very entertaining human being. You can follow me at Twitter at Kenneka Tolver, Instagram at Kenneka Tolver, LinkedIn at Kenneka Tolver. And you can follow me on YouTube at Kenneka Tolver.

You will not be disappointed. I have to co-sign that. It's not just about tech. It's not just about career. She's literally a well-rounded executive level presence to follow on Twitter. If you're on your journey to become a CTO, CIO, executive, she is a great resource to follow on social media. com. Make sure to rate the podcast in your favorite pod catcher. Until then, talk to you next CTO dose. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.