The "propeller-heads" were right. It is all just a little bit of history repeating. Our cyclical economy is improving, as can be manifested by the number of people querying me about what to tell potential employers with whom they are interviewing about their reasons for wanting to leave their current positions - the jobs they've accepted during tough economic times, having been fortunate to join the ranks of the "underemployed" as opposed to the "unemployed."

Thus it appears that employers' worst fears and paranoia are becoming true. The great talent they were lucky to procure at deflated market rates is now actively seeking to leave them and take more appropriate and higher-paying positions as the economy improves. The same employers who voiced these concerns in interviews and asked, "I feel you are overqualified for this position; how can I be sure that when the economy improves, you won't leave to take another job?" and accepted the "Benefit from my experience and I will be happy to grow with your company" retort are now seeing they may have been too trusting. But should we feel sorry for these employers, some of which were taking advantage of these poor, unemployed and frustrated jobseekers when the recession gave companies the upper hand? As the pendulum begins to sway towards the employee holding the power of choice, we must keep in mind that the employer still has the final decision in selecting who to hire. So why DO you want to leave your current position after working there only a year?

Despite employers already suspecting that you want to earn more money and a higher-level position, it is politically incorrect to say so, as it infers greed. The answer you give them should state your desire for additional growth opportunities that your current, smaller employer may not have available due to their size. Or you could say that you want to expand your scope of work in a smaller organization rather than becoming pigeonholed into doing only one specific task. And it is true that employers will already be predisposed to hiring you if you're currently employed. They tend to rationalize that you have the technical and interpersonal skills it took to find and/or maintain a job during a recession. And during that time you were obviously honing and developing those skills even further while your less fortunate job-seeking counterparts may not have had the same opportunity to keep their skills up-to-date (unless they took my advice from a previous column and performed career-relevant volunteer work).

So the moral of this cyclical tale is that the economy and job market will undergo periodic ebbs and flows and employers and employees will find that they have intermittent power in the job search process. It's a fact of life and we must deal with it and learn to live within its parameters, understanding that we must always look out for ourselves, because this is strictly business, not personal. And if you wait a few more years, it'll all be a little bit of history repeating itself all over again.