'Why are you leaving your current role?': answers that don't badmouth and don't blur

Because I'm ready to run a function, and at my current company that seat is filled — happily and well — for the foreseeable future.

I lead customer operations for a subscriptions business: a team of eleven, and in three years we've taken first-response time from a day and a half to under four hours, mostly by rebuilding the triage rules and giving the team authority to resolve rather than escalate. I've done the visible parts of the next level too — I ran the function for nine weeks while my director was on leave, and presented the quarterly review to the board in her place.

My director knows I'm looking; we've talked about it openly, and there's simply no succession event coming. I'd rather leave one job too early than one promotion too late.

What pulled me to this role specifically is that it isn't a caretaker post — the spec says rebuild, and the rebuild parts are exactly what I've already done once at smaller scale. I'm leaving a company I like, on good terms, for the job it can't give me.

It is a step sideways — deliberately. Let me give you the logic rather than make it sound like an accident.

I've sold pharmaceuticals into primary care for six years, and I've been consistently at or above target — last full year I finished third of twenty-eight in the region. The ceiling isn't my performance; it's that I've realised I sell best when the product is tangible and the conversation is clinical-practical. The two deals I've most enjoyed in six years were both the rare occasions I supported a device co-promotion — theatre visits, hands-on evaluation, a surgeon asking 'show me'. I've spent this spring testing that instinct properly: I shadowed a devices rep for two days of theatre access, and I've done the anatomy module of the industry's device-sales certificate.

Same commercial skills, better-fitting product — that's the whole move. The sideways step costs me some seniority optics for a year; what it buys is a lane I'd stay in for a decade. I'd call that a good trade, and I've priced it deliberately.

The site closed. The company consolidated three UK plants into two last autumn, and mine — the smallest — lost the vote. Forty-two roles went, mine among them; it was about geography and overheads, not performance, and I have the reference to show for it.

I'll be straightforward about the first month: it stung. I'd been there nine years and I'd built the incoming-inspection process the other two sites then adopted — there's a version of this story where I pretend the ending didn't matter, and it wouldn't be true.

What I did with it: took a fortnight to reset, then treated the search as a project. I used the redundancy window to finish my Six Sigma green belt — it had been half-done for two years, honestly — and I've been selective about applications rather than scattergun. Fourteen applications, four interviews, no panic.

The reason this role, specifically: your spec reads like the job I'd already grown into — supplier quality across multiple sites — and arriving by redundancy rather than resignation doesn't change what I'm arriving with.

Because I got the diagnosis wrong a year ago, and I'd rather correct it in one move than slowly resent a job that's wrong for reasons that won't change.

When I joined the agency I believed the role was what the interview described: leading client relationships with room to shape strategy. The reality — through nobody's dishonesty, the agency's biggest client restructured a month after I started — is that the job became ninety-minute status calls and reactive delivery. Legitimate work; not my work.

I didn't leave at the first itch. I raised it properly at my six-month review, my manager and I redesigned the split so I'd take on the two smaller strategic accounts, and we gave it a full quarter. It moved things perhaps a fifth of the way. We both concluded the shape of the client book is the shape of the job.

So the leaving story is short: right skills, wrong seat, tried honestly to fix the seat. What I'm being careful about this time — and it's half the reason I'm asking you so many questions today — is verifying the day-to-day before I say yes.

Honestly? A different building portfolio — and that's not on offer.

My leaving logic is structural. I manage facilities for a single corporate head office: one landlord relationship, one plant room, one annual cycle. I've made it run well — we've had two years without an unplanned closure, and I renegotiated the maintenance contract to include out-of-hours cover at the same cost by consolidating three suppliers into one. But a single building, however well run, teaches you the same year on repeat.

This role is a portfolio of nine sites across two regions. Different building ages, competing priorities, capital-works triage — the problems I want the next five years to be made of.

So if my employer offered more money, I'd thank them; it wouldn't change the arithmetic, because money was never the variable. If they acquired eight more buildings, that would change it — and I think we'd both agree that's not a retention strategy anyone's planning. That's how you can tell the pull is real: the fix isn't in anyone's gift.