Naked Resignation
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Will you pull a “naked resignation”?
After the Spring Festival, the social phenomenon of “Luo Ci”– Chinese for “naked resignation”–among young white-collar workers has received much attention in the mass media. As a buzzword coined in recent years, “naked resignation” means quitting a job before finding the next one. In their interviews, many young people talked about different reasons for doing this. Some have been planning to quit their jobs for a long time but will wait until the annual bonus is given out before handing in their resignation to take a career break. Others, after talking to family members during the Spring Festival vacation, have a new understanding of their career development and therefore choose to leave their current jobs. And another pull factor which will intensify young people’s dissatisfaction of current jobs and eventually lead to their resignation is the comparison of their working situation with that of their friends. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, before giving your “naked resignation notice” regardless of all the other concerns, we suggest young people to carefully and thoroughly consider the following points: Firstly, do you have enough money saved to live for a period of time without income? By referring to your current living expenses, try to estimate how long you can live comfortably without income while searching for a new job. Secondly, be well aware of the labor market situation so as to find out whether there is a large demand for talents in the near future. Thirdly, assess your competition. Make an assessment of your overall competitiveness in the talent market by taking into account all your abilities such as professional expertise and English skills. Being fully aware of your capabilities and advantage over others can prevent you from making careless and wrong decisions when facing job hunt setbacks. Fourthly, do you have temporary alternatives such as part-time work opportunities if you fail to find an ideal job within your estimated time period? Although it is good for young office workers to keep seeking their career “pathways”, we still suggest that they should stop impulsive decision-making and try to think calmly and rationally before a “naked resignation”.
Naked resignations' reveal workplace frustrations
One of the hot phrases during the rounds recently in China is "naked resignation" - which means quitting a job without lining up another. It is well known that Chinese people are the model of hard work and diligence, and "naked resignation" would have been beyond imagination 10 years ago when I first came to China. According to a recent survey covering 8,064 respondents by Global Times and Sohu.com, more than 43 percent had done, or were considering, "naked resignation". Among them, more than half explained that the main reason was the lack of satisfaction and happiness at work. Nowadays, an increasing number of Chinese youth are pursuing a balance between work and life and personal happiness. My company, RMG Selection, is a China-focused specialist HR and recruitment consultancy. Our consultants contact thousands of job-hunters or outstanding candidates and one of them told me a very interesting story about a candidate, Ma. Ma was a typical rising star: a graduate from a prestigious university, he worked at a famous audit firm for more than three years and had just been promoted as supervisor. This was the optimum opportunity to look for a new job. However, right after the Chinese New Year, which is regarded as the best time for job-hopping, Ma decided to resign, and told our consultant not to offer him new positions for the moment. Why did Ma do so? Because he feels that he had lost himself: in the past three years, Ma had to regularly work overtime and go on business trips frequently, and he found that he had no time to take care of his family, be in a relationship and to continue his hobbies. Therefore, when the boss asked him to go on a business trip after the Spring Festival, Ma just spent three minutes to write a resignation letter and leave the company. It's really hard to imagine such a situation happening to my friends in London, who find it quite difficult to make ends meet given the high cost of living. This is quite different from Chinese people according to my personal experiences. Chinese people prefer saving, a legacy of the economic hardships during the earlier stages of New China. Although China's economy is booming and many first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, offer expensive temptations similar to be found in New York, the habit of saving has been retained, especially among those who have children. Most of them have acquired assets to deal with various crises. Therefore, even though they have no income for a period of time, they don't have to worry too much. In addition, family plays an important part in Chinese culture. Even if their children have already graduated from universities and got a job, parents still offer them a lot of support, such as sharing a house or financial assistance for a downpayment. Of course, children support their parents when they are in a good financial situation. This phenomenon is very common in China, just as children have to be economically independent after graduation in the West. This solid family backing is another reason why Chinese youth dare to resign abruptly. Apart from material changes, another important factor leading to "naked resignation" lies in the mentality of Chinese youth, especially the post-80s generation. They focus more on career happiness and achievement and pursue a balance between work and life, which is quite different from the older generation. At the end of last year, Qianjiang Evening News conducted a survey aimed at investigating the reasons of "naked resignation". In this survey, 48 percent of the respondents preferred to stay at home due to the heavy workload and poor salary, while 27 percent considered their current jobs valueless and meaningless, so they would like to resign and study more. Personally speaking, I do think this is a good phenomenon, for a mature and advanced job market should attach great importance to workers' happiness. Nevertheless, there are always other solutions, such as communication, and usually it can solve as much as 90 percent of the problems. We cannot always stay at home without working. Most importantly, we must never be impetuous. Some young people hope to get a perfect job after "naked resignation". But I have to say there is no "perfect job" in the world. If you can really find such a job, please do let me know!
China's younger generation: lifestyle counts as much as work
BEIJING — Early this year Song Hao, a stocky, bearded video editor in his late 20s, began to feel that the job he'd been doing for nearly four years was boring, leading nowhere, and certainly not worth the overtime he was made to do every evening. "I wanted to take a break and use the time to do something I really liked, even if it didn't earn me any money," Mr. Song said one recent evening over a cappuccino in a Beijing cafe. He had no other job lined up, or any immediate plans to find one. He did, though, have enough savings to keep him going for a few months and a burning desire to make a short movie with some friends. And that's what he did. Three months later he went back to work, at a different company. Such a casual attitude to the workplace would have been unthinkable in China just five years ago. But in an emerging social trend, growing numbers of young people "are more concerned with their own feelings and their happiness and less worried about salary and status," says Hong Xiangyang, founder of the Sunward employment agency in Shanghai. "These 'little emperors' live for themselves," Mr. Hong adds, using the familiar epithet for products of China's one-child policy. "They find it hard to bow to the demands of the group" and are less willing to put up with a job they don't like just because they are supposed to. Hong first noticed the phenomenon early last year, he says, as more and more clients began coming to him in search of a job having already left the one they had been doing. So he started studying what has become known as "naked resignation" because people quit without being covered by the security of another job. "I reckon about 80 percent of big-city dwellers between 22 and 35 have thought about naked resignation and 22 percent have done it," estimates Hong. "And half of them have been in the workforce for less than three years." Song had worked at the same job for four years and had a project in mind when he quit. He regards himself as extremely responsible compared with younger colleagues. "Today's young people think completely differently from their parents," adds Li Changan, professor of labor economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. "If they are not happy in their job, they'll quit as soon as they can." Until 1994, Chinese college graduates were assigned a job by the government and expected to stay in it for the rest of their lives. Blue-collar kids, as often as not, took the jobs their mothers and fathers retired from. Even the freedom to choose an employer, when it was introduced, did not encourage everyone to do so in a country accustomed to an "iron rice bowl" – cradle-to-grave security – from the state. Today's entrants into the workforce, though, are much more demanding, and they can afford to be, says Tian Zhimin, who heads a boutique employment agency in Beijing. "As China's economy grows, enterprises need to hire more talent and more different kinds of talent," he says. "There are a lot of job opportunities." That suits young women with an adventurous streak such as Sally Zhou, who says she wants "to try everything new" and believes that her generation, freed from the sorts of shortages that bedeviled her parents and grandparents, "should experience anything they want to." Ms. Zhou walked out of a job at a Beijing public relations firm last July, she says, because she was moved from a department she liked to one she did not without being consulted. "I'm not a quitter," she says, "but I didn't like the way they didn't talk to me about the transfer." So she went off to Inner Mongolia for a couple of months, picking up a temporary gig by chance as a tour guide, before returning to Beijing. Zhou speaks English and German and says she is confident she will find another job soon. But she admits she is a little worried about the impact on her career of having quit impetuously. Chen Lin, another 20-something woman with a habit of following her instincts, is becoming a serial "naked resigner." She quit a job as a receptionist at a five-star Beijing hotel after only two months because she was fed up with sudden shift changes. It took her only two weeks to find another job. Nine months later she walked out of that job, too, complaining that her employer "thinks I should be proud to do overtime without pay." Until recently, Chinese employees would have put up with that. But the youngest yuppies today regard such demands as unreasonable and are not prepared to work long hours for comparatively low salaries. "If they feel under heavy pressure at work, they leave," says Professor Li. "As living standards in China improve, this will get more and more common," says Hong, who points to similarities between the current generation of young Chinese and the '60s generation in America. "Young people will listen more to their hearts."
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Examples
1 Many employees in China haven chosen the path of "naked resignation" to take a break from work while they rethink their career plans.
2 "Naked resignation," or quitting a job without finding a new one, is becoming increasingly popular among white-collar workers in China after the trend first emerged last year, the City Economic Herald reports.
3 It is well known that Chinese people are the model of hard work and diligence, and “naked resignation” would have been beyond imagination 10 years ago when I first came to China.