At a time when rank and file workers were leaving their jobs under the great resignation crisis, CEOs have joined them as well, as many chief executive officers have reportedly resigned lately.
Top corporate management is leaving tough jobs
The top resignations of 2021 included names like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Bob Iger of Disney, and Doug Parker of American Airlines.
Also, the trend has continued in 2022, as some big names already resigned in the first three weeks of the current year.
Jeff Bezos to resign as chief executive of Amazon https://t.co/BBqhYlJZDM
— The Guardian (@guardian) February 2, 2021
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm, reported that 16 percent more CEOs left their jobs in the last quarter of 2021, compared to the same time in 2020.
While 106 chief executives did it in December, almost 142 left in October last year.
Maurice Cayer, a teacher of industrial and organizational psychology, stated this trend is manifesting since many older executives are already doing fine in their lives. They’re settled financially and leaving their jobs to assume less strained employment or even take retirement.
According to Cayer, most of them belong to the baby boomer community and are making top dollar, so they want to “get off the racetrack” after their careers.
The management professor also established that many companies are nervous about the pandemic recovery. Some of them are reluctant to offer lucrative pay to executives anymore, which is why they have decided to switch their jobs.
Mass CEO resignations depict a new startup wave
As per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, almost three percent of the non-farm workforce, amounting to over 4.5 million Americans, quit in November last year.
Similarly, the bureau reported that almost 20 percent of Americans quit the workforce from April to November last year, hence leaving almost 10.6 million job openings by the end of November. The department will release the data for December on February 1.
Meanwhile, a healthy number of startups began hiring executives last year. The Census Bureau released data on January 12 which states that 5.4 million new business applications were filed by entrepreneurs in 2021 alone, breaking the record of 4.4 million in 2020.
Calling it “capitalism at its best,” Charles Mizrahi, a Wall Street trader, noted this signifies the new Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon would have a founding date of 2022.
Mizrahi claimed the numbers are justifying entrepreneurship culture, and people are preferring to work for themselves. Growing startups in America also complement the leaving executive numbers.
One of the top job websites, ZipRecruiter, reported 40,681 executive-level job openings in October last year; this was almost double the monthly average of 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic in May 2020, only 9,301 such postings were reported by the platform.
The “Great Resignation” is not bad news. It's American workers flexing their muscles for the first time in decades. I say it’s about time. https://t.co/sQnFC36PGF
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) January 24, 2022
Julia Pollak, the chief economist of ZipRecruiter, told NBC News that various factors, including COVID burnout and people’s pursuits to enjoy their lives, are the likely reasons for mass resignations.
