Why do people quit their jobs? Pew Research Center put that question to workers who had left a job by choice. None of the answers were dramatic.

Low pay came up for 63 percent of them. No way up came up for the same 63 percent. Being treated as if the work did not matter came up for 57 percent.

Here is the short answer before the detail. Quitting traces back to a small set of causes. The one that fits you decides what you should do next. Most of them mean you need a different employer.

Just one of them means you need a different kind of work - and that is a far bigger decision than updating your resume. So the reason to read through the causes is to work out which kind of problem you actually have. Leaving a job that underpaid you, for a job that underpays you the same way, is the most common mistake here. It costs you 2 years and you learn nothing from it.

Check Your Own Reason Against Why People Quit Their Jobs

Leaving is ordinary, and it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 3.1 million quits in August 2026. That works out to 1.9 percent of all employed workers, and the figure barely shifts month to month. Millions of workers hand in their notice every month, so the useful question is what they leave over.

Here is the United States version of the numbers. American survey data on this is the most detailed and the easiest to check. Pew surveyed 6,627 non-retired adults in February 2022. Of those, 965 had quit a job by choice during the year before, and their answers are where the percentages below come from.

Reading this outside the United States? Do the same work with your own figures. Look up the pay survey your profession publishes where you live, and look up what your national statistics office reports about job changes in your industry.

Then measure your own pay and progress against those. The American figures below are only an example of how to run the check.

1. Your Pay Stopped Matching What the Job Now Asks of You

Low pay was the most common answer Pew got, at 63 percent. Read that one carefully, because it is rarely about the salary you started on. It is about what happened to the job afterwards.

Jobs grow in scope without anybody announcing it. You pick up the client that got passed around until it reached you. You take over a process when the person who ran it left. Suddenly you are reviewing work that used to come back to you finished.

None of that shows up as a new job title. Almost none of it shows up in your pay. By the third year, the job you are doing and the job you were hired for are 2 different jobs at one price.

Here is the test. Write out everything you handled this year that was not in the job description when you signed. Then look up what the market pays for a role that includes those duties. A small gap means you have a raise conversation to go and have. A large gap, in a company that has already told you what it pays for your level, is an answer about this employer and no answer at all about your profession.

2. You Cannot See a Job Above You That You Want

No opportunities for advancement tied with low pay in the Pew survey, also at 63 percent. Most career advice reads that as a shortage of open positions above you. Usually it is something less obvious.

Look one level up, at the person whose job you would get next. Often that promotion is perfectly available. You have watched the job for 3 years and decided you do not want it. Their calendar is meetings and their work is approving other people’s work, so the prize for doing well here has stopped being worth much to you.

That distinction matters, because the 2 cases have opposite fixes. If the promotion is blocked, another employer solves it for you and the move is straightforward. If you looked at the promotion and did not want it, moving changes very little. The same job will be sitting above you at the next place.

So say the next job out loud, duties included, and then say whether you want it. The answer comes faster than you expect.

3. Your Manager Treats You as Easy to Replace

Feeling disrespected at work was the answer for 57 percent of the workers Pew asked. Gallup’s research points at the same thing from another angle. When it ranked what drives burnout, unfair treatment at work came out as the strongest factor. It beat workload and it beat time pressure.

This cause is hard to pin down, because it rarely involves anybody being rude to you. It looks like your estimate getting halved without a conversation. Or a decision about your own work getting made in a meeting you were not invited to. Being treated as replaceable is mostly a run of small moments where your judgment was available and nobody asked for it.

The test here is a count. Over the last 6 months, how many decisions about your own work were made without asking you first? If the answer is most of them, this job is not using the thing you are best at. Good pay does not change that.

4. You Do Not Know What You Are Being Measured On

Gallup surveyed 79,087 working adults across 2024. Only 46 percent strongly agreed that they clearly know what is expected of them at work. That figure was 56 percent in March 2020. Over the same stretch, the share of employees Gallup counts as engaged fell to 31 percent.

Unclear expectations do something specific to you. You cannot tell a good week from a bad one. So you start working to feel busy instead of working to finish something. When nobody has told you what counts, every hour you put in feels like it might be the wrong hour. That is its own kind of tiring, and it wears you down even in a quiet month.

Try this before you decide anything. Ask your manager what 3 things they would point at in 6 months to say you did well. If they can answer in a sentence each, your problem is fixable inside this job. If the question itself makes them uncomfortable, you have learned something about how long you should stay.

5. The Workload Burned You Out and Nothing Changed

Gallup reports that 76 percent of employees experience burnout on the job at least sometimes. It also found that 28 percent say it happens very often or always. That second figure is the one to pay attention to. If burnout turns up most weeks, the job is built in a way that produces it, and a quieter quarter will not fix that.

Pew found that 39 percent of the workers who quit cited working too many hours. Another 45 percent cited having no say over when they worked. Those 2 answers travel together. What pushes workers out is a heavy stretch with no finish date in sight.

So ask what happened the last time you said the workload was too heavy. If something came off your plate, this job can be fixed and it is worth fixing. If you got sympathy and then nothing, you have your test result. Having the same conversation a fourth time will not change it.

6. You Have Stopped Learning Anything New on the Job

This is the cause survey data handles badly, because it does not feel like a grievance. Nothing is wrong. You are good at the work, the pay is fine, and you could do next year with your eyes closed. That is the problem.

Matej Latin is a self-taught designer who moved from graphic design into product design roles at large tech companies. He wrote about why he left design jobs, and neither reason was money. The first was that his work took so long to ship that he never got feedback on it. The second he puts simply: “When I was a junior designer I was happy to do any type of design work. But the more experienced I got, the more sophisticated design work I wanted to do.”

Outgrowing the work is the one cause on this list that a better employer in the same field does not reliably fix. Here is the check. Write down the last thing this job taught you that you did not already know. Put a date next to it. If that date is more than a year old, the job is finished with you whether or not it has said so.

Decide Whether You Need a New Employer or a New Line of Work

Being underpaid, being blocked, being treated as replaceable, being measured on nothing and being worked past your limit are all things a different employer can fix. That is the good news. It is why most quits are a job search and nothing more.

Outgrowing the work is the cause that follows you to the next company. So is the promotion you looked at and turned down in your head. The next employer has the same job sitting above you.

Here is the sharper test, and almost no career guide gives it to you. Answer this one question. What do you want to be noticeably better at in 3 years than you are today?

If the skill you say out loud is one your current field uses every day, you need a different employer, and you should go and get one. If you cannot say a skill at all, you have a direction problem. The same goes if the skill you name belongs to a different field. In both of those cases, changing companies is going to feel like progress for about 7 months.

That second answer is what sends workers toward design, and it is worth slowing down here. Wanting out of a job is a different feeling from wanting to do design work. The 2 get mistaken for each other constantly. So look at what the work pays, what it demands of you, and whether you like doing it - before you spend anything.

See What Design Work Pays Before You Commit to Learning It

Design covers 2 very different job markets, and the figures make that obvious. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for graphic designers at $62,960 as of May 2025. It projects employment in that role to fall 2 percent between 2025 and 2035.

For web and digital interface designers the median is $104,000 in the same month. The wider group BLS counts those jobs in is projected to grow 5 percent over that decade, with roughly 13,600 openings a year.

The same word covers a shrinking market and a growing one that pays about 65 percent more. That gap is why the direction you pick at the start matters more than how hard you work afterwards. It is also why the first thing to settle is which design job you are aiming at.

Those are American figures, named as such. Where you live, pull the same 2 numbers from your national statistics office or your national design association. What does the median designer earn in your country, and is the count of those jobs going up or down? Then compare the design role you are considering against the job you have right now, in your own currency.

Before you put real money into a career program, test whether you like the work at all. That is what our School of Design On-Demand membership is for, at $29 a month on the Saver plan. It is the cheap way to find out whether design holds your attention for 8 weeks while you are still collecting a paycheck. Plenty of our members find out that it does not, and that is a useful thing to learn for $29.

Start Learning Design While You Are Still Drawing a Salary

You do not need a sabbatical, a career break or a gap in your income to start. That matters. The advice you will read elsewhere often assumes the opposite, and the assumption keeps capable workers stuck for years.

Taylor Palmer of UX Tools interviewed 20 designers who had switched into UX from teaching, architecture, marketing and event planning. The lowest-risk route they described starts inside the company you already work for. Tell the product, engineering and marketing teams that design interests you. Then volunteer for the work that sits close to design and has no owner. His conclusion on the training question is blunt, and we agree with it: “Remember that a bootcamp won’t get you a job, but a portfolio will.”

A portfolio is the one thing a hiring manager in design will sit down and read, and it is the piece most career switchers get wrong. They finish a course and put the course projects online. Then they compete against 200 other candidates who took the same course and uploaded the same projects.

That is why we built Portfolio School, which starts at $2,100. It exists to get you a body of work that looks like yours and nobody else’s. That is what gets your portfolio read all the way through.

Still working out which design path fits the experience you already have? Our guide on how to transition into UI/UX design from another field walks through the realistic routes. Our comparison of design bootcamps tells you where we are the wrong choice as well as where we are the right one.

Key Takeaways

1. Pay complaints are usually about scope. The job grew and your title and salary did not. By the third year you are doing 2 jobs for the price of one.

2. When no promotion above you appeals, check which case you are in. A blocked promotion is fixed by another employer, and a promotion you looked at and did not want will be waiting at the next company too.

3. Being treated as replaceable is rarely about rudeness. Count the decisions about your own work that got made without asking you, because that count is the real measure.

4. Gallup found that only 46 percent of the workers it surveyed in 2024 clearly knew what was expected of them. Ask your manager for the 3 things they would judge you on in 6 months, and their answer tells you whether to stay.

5. Burnout that turns up most weeks comes from how the job is built. What happened the last time you said the workload was too heavy is the test that matters, and sympathy followed by nothing is a result.

6. Outgrowing the work is the one cause a new employer in the same field will not fix. Say what you want to be better at in 3 years, and if it belongs to another field, change the work itself.

Homework You Can Finish Within a Week

Price the Job You Have Against the Job You Want

List what you took on this year that was not in your original job description. Then find 3 current job postings that include those duties and note their salary ranges. You now have a number for the raise conversation and a number for the move, and you can put them side by side.

Ask Your Manager What You Are Measured On

Put one question to them: what would you point at in 6 months to say this went well? Write down their answer word for word. Either way you have learned something you can act on.

Spend Two Hours on a Real Design Problem

Pick an app you use and dislike, redesign one screen of it, and put down 3 sentences on what you changed and why. That is 2 hours before work across a couple of mornings. How those 2 hours felt tells you more than a month of reading about design careers.

Talk to One Designer Who Switched Careers

Find a designer who came from a field like yours and ask them 2 things. How long was it before a company paid them to design? And what would they skip if they started again? A single honest answer beats 10 success stories.

The Part You Should Not Work Out by Yourself

By now you know which kind of problem you have. If the work itself has stopped giving you anything, the step that decides everything else is which design path you commit to. That is the step people get wrong on their own. Picking the shrinking end of the market, or building a portfolio that looks like every other candidate’s, costs 2 years and several thousand dollars before anybody tells you.

The School of UI/UX Design Is How You Switch into Design Work

Our School of UI/UX Design is for you if you are employed full time, have real expertise in another field, and have no design portfolio yet. It takes you from there to the point where a company will hire you as a designer. It is built around the 2 things career switchers cannot do alone: choosing the design path that fits the experience you already have, and building work that is yours.

Tuition is $7,080 all-in and you keep your job while you do it. You also get a weekly 1:1 with the same senior designer the whole way through, instead of a different mentor every few weeks. Our placement rate is 92.5 percent, measured at time-to-employment among graduates of completed cohorts.

A Free Clarity Call Tells You If Design Is Worth Your Money

Not sure design is the answer at all? Book a free clarity call and talk it through with a real person. We will tell you directly when one of the other schools is a better fit for you. We will also tell you when the problem you described is an employer problem that no design program will solve. If design does turn out to be the right move, that call is where we work out together whether the School of UI/UX Design is the version of it you should buy.