Why I quit my job...

It was early on a Wednesday morning. I was sitting at my desk taking the first few sips of coffee, for once at work I was calm. No apprehension about dealing with difficult clients, no dread of dealing with my overbearing, micro-managing boss, for once not wondering "What time can I leave today?"

I didn't have a new job lined up. But at that point it didn't matter to me. I'd had enough.

There are many reasons to quit a job. You don't like the work, you don't get paid well enough, there is no opportunity for promotion, and on and on and on. None of these are really the reason I quit.

Don't get me wrong, there are definitely politics, personal differences, and maybe a little bad blood surrounding my departure. I wasn't paid enough, I didn't feel like I was positively contributing to the world, and I didn't feel like my company appreciated me.

But what I am realizing more and more, and perhaps this is a justification, but I had peaked.

Does this mean that I will never improve, that I am as good as I could possibly be? No. It means that I had made the most of the opportunity, that I had improved as much as I could under the conditions, and that any further improvement would be restricted by the company culture and the limitations of my position.

So it was time to move on. Time to find a new environment, to continue to grow, to continue to make myself better.

One thing I would like to urge to all of my peers before I sign off. To all you twenty-somethings out there: we have all worked hard, some of us have fancy degrees and credentials. That does not mean that our education is over. When I took my previous job, I wasn't happy that I was being paid only a little more than I made as a grad student. What I saw was the opportunity to learn about business, to expand my skill-set, and make myself more valuable to any future employer.

Education doesn't start and stop with school. Education starts and stops with YOU.

What do you value in a workplace? What are some reasons that you quit a job?