Meet the 40-year-old millennial who joined the Great Resignation because her employer wouldn't let her work remotely: 'I chose to be happy'

• Leila, a 40-year-old millennial librarian, joined the Great Resignation in January.
• She was fed up with a toxic environment, little advancement opportunities, and poor policies for parents.

One 40-year-old millennial is the latest American to join the Great Resignation.

Just two weeks ago, Leila, whose name Insider changed for privacy reasons, quit her job of five years as a technical services librarian at a public library in Iowa. She told Insider it was a toxic environment rife with turnover, few advancement opportunities, and poor policies for working parents.

But she said the biggest factor was that her employer wouldn't let her work remotely, as she had previously done during the pandemic — and even though there was a city policy in place to allow for remote work on a temporary basis.

Leila also felt undervalued and overworked. She said she wasn't recognized as a professional in the field since she didn't have the 20 years of work experience that her other librarian counterparts did, often stuck doing management-level tasks without a matching promotion.

In the end, Leila became one of the four million Americans who have quit their jobs every month since April. And it's similar-minded midcareer employees like her that are leading the Great Resignation, according to an analysis by Harvard Business Review that found resignation rates are highest among 30- to 45-year-old employees.

Like Leila, many of them are fed up with a lack of flexibility and feeling unappreciated, often parents in search of a better work-life balance. And, like Leila, many are quitting without something lined up, taking advantage of the current demand for mid-level workers. BLS data from December revealed that Americans aged 35 to 44 represent the only age cohort out of six to be at or above its pre-pandemic employment level, indicating that the resignation is more of a reshuffle than anything.

Leila's story is one of how geriatric millennials have the most power in the workforce right now. But her job hunt was a nearly a year-and-a-half in the making.

An overworked mother

Leila began poking around for jobs in August 2020, when she said she was content at her public library job but not necessarily happy. At the time, she was only working 29 hours a week after the city government cut hours for employees working three-fourths of the time in order to not pay health insurance after Obamacare went into effect.

She soon took on a temporary part-time job at a local academic library to help cover a librarians' medical leave, a stint she said reinvigorated her work at her original job.

"At this point I was still working remotely and loving every bit of it," she said.

But that all changed come January 2021, when the staff was asked to return to in-person work. Leila said she was asked to work a weekend rotation or one evening a week because of high staff turnover and a hiring freeze — something she didn't have to do before the pandemic.

"I made the compromise to work the same night every week so my kids knew the routine of when mom worked late," Leila said. "I had to fight hard in order to work only one evening and have it be the same evening in order to provide my children a consistent routine and find childcare if necessary when my spouse was working overtime."

In an endless cycle, working more to compensate for the labor shortage left by fellow employees who quit is a common reason why many other workers joined the Great Resignation. So, too, is the inability to juggle work and childcare during the pandemic.

By spring, Leila's boss had left and the interim replacement "became a micromanging tyrant," she said. She had also started missing aspects of academic librarianship, a field she previously worked in. She spent the summer applying to nearly every library job she saw and attending conferences to brush up on her skills. The hunt was "hard" and "exhausting," she said.

The last straw was a lack of flexibility

Come November, Leila accepted an offer for a part-time academic library job for 20 hours a week at a local university to assist them during staffing issues, where she said her skillset was in demand.

She hoped the public library she was already working at would grant her the opportunity to work a few hours remotely to balance the two jobs, which entailed working every Saturday and 12 hours on Thursday. But she said two managers were against the idea.

The only staff members who were granted remote working hours were those doing virtual programming such as book clubs. And while they offered her that opportunity, Leila said she couldn't add another job duty to her plate without sacrificing her work performance.

"This was the last straw for this working mother of three," she said, adding that the library's policies weren't friendly for parents of young children, especially for mothers who were typically excluded from management jobs because they were viewed as not being able to balance the workload.

So, Leila finally quit her public library job in January while continuing to work the part-time job at the local university. When she put in her two weeks notice, she also snagged a gig as a substitute teacher to supplement her income and help alleviate the teaching shortage in Iowa.

"At that point, I was ready to get out even if it meant leaving a job that I loved [for] self-care in order to heal from the bullying, toxicity, and undo stress it was causing to my marriage and family life," she said. "I chose to be happy."