End of Job Loyalty?

Computerworld - Two weeks after Damon Remy joined a hospitality company, his boss quit and almost all of the IT department was outsourced to a consulting firm.
"I was misled about the company and my role in it," Remy says. For example, though his title was director of information technology, Remy wasn't involved in making decisions about the firm's technological or strategic directions. "My boss had sent out a quarterly update memo listing 15 projects IT was involved in - and I only knew about three of them," he says.
But the straw that broke Remy's back was when he was ready to spend about $9,000 of his own money to get his Cisco and Microsoft network certifications - and the company wouldn't give him time off for the training.
Then he got a raise of just 3% after 18 months - even though his boss agreed that it wasn't commensurate with the value of Remy's performance.
"I felt like the abused stepchild," Remy says. He left in March to join a communications company where he hopes to work with the latest wireless data technology, be part of a team and see his impact on the bottom line. "I want to feel good about coming to work," he says.
Remy's got company. More than half the respondents to Computerworld's recent Job Satisfaction Survey said their job satisfaction went down (again) in the past year. Almost 88% of the survey respondents said they are either actively looking to change jobs, thinking about looking or would take a new job if the opportunity presented itself.
More money ranked as the No. 1 reason for moving to a new position. Other considerations included more training opportunities, working with new technologies, more challenging assignments and a more interesting technical direction in a new employer's IT department.
Those are the matter-of-fact reasons behind a job hunt. Ask more than a dozen IT professionals why they actually left a company, though, and their answers are more complex. They involve relations with management, broken promises, lack of communication, internal politics and more.
Management is most often cited as the wellspring of dissatisfaction. Take the senior project manager at a multinational IT services firm managing the national network of a U.S. financial institution. Of the dozen people in his group, six are job hunting, and the rest are polishing their resumes, he says, even though the employer offers excellent training, bleeding-edge technology and fine benefits.
The problem? "I've been managed to death, and I don't see any leadership," says the