A couple of weeks ago I successfully passed the mandatory probationary period with McAfee, and I was reminded that a mere three months ago, I had to quit a previous job before joining McAfee. While the prospect of starting a new job is usually time filled with nervous excitement, it’s important to consider the job that you’re leaving behind. Here are a few things that worked for me when leaving my last position. These ideas may be biased to software development positions, but they surely can apply to other fields.

Documentation
When somebody leaves a company, not only is a body walking out the door, so too is corporate knowledge. You’d be surprised how much knowledge you acquire that’s valuable to the company that you’re about to leave. As such, if there isn’t a formal Knowledge Management system in place, it’s a good idea to document everything that you know that other employees wouldn’t. The obvious ones are your passwords and such. Maybe, though, you wrote a small undocumented utility for Human Resources. At some point, that utility may require new features or a bug fix. You can avoid email or phone calls six months down the road from your former employer asking how a certain routine works. Or perhaps you were responsible for getting an applications patches/hotfixes and storing them on a network share – document where you get the files and where you put them.

Also, the files on your computer that you used in your work are probably placed in a file structure that makes sense to you. Again, in the absence of a Knowledge Management or Source Control system, others may not know where to find various files on your computer. Document the location of the files on your computer and the project that they’re applicable to.

Don’t forget to note the names/positions/contact info of any consultants or contractors and the projects that you worked with them on. You’d rather your former colleagues ask consultants or contractors questions than you, once you’ve moved on.

When in doubt, if you know something that nobody else in the company knows, document it.

Keep in Touch
If you had a good working relationship with your manager, exchange contact information. Do the same with other colleagues. It can be something as complex as adding them to your LinkedIn or Facebook friends list, or as simple as swapping personal email addresses and phone numbers. These people likely have similar interests and skills sets as yours, which means that they can become valuable sources of information and perhaps even references for your future endeavours.

Tidy Up
IT will take your computer and rummage through it. Don’t believe me? When it was one of my (too) many duties several years ago, that’s what I would do to computers of employees that left the company, voluntarily or otherwise. It was a standard procedure. Employers often want to know what you worked on. They also want to know if you were doing something undesirable such as stealing company data or using their equipment for your consulting business. Finding the juxtaposition of religious bookmarks and hardcore porn on your computer is just icing on the cake, sure to make many of that company’s IT people laugh at for years to come.

Don’t Be A Dick
You’re moving on to greener pastures, but you don’t need to make your soon-to-be former co-workers feel like losers for sticking around the place that you’re leaving. It’s face-punchingly annoying to hear someone going on and on about how they “don’t give a shit” during their last two weeks on the job before they move on. Aggravating can’t even begin to describe the feeling when the exiting person declares that “it’s not my problem anymore” about a project that you’ve both been working. If your former company won’t eschew the next two weeks and send you off on your merry way early, work like you normally would; like there’s still other colleagues depending on you, because there are. Always remember that you never know who you’re going to work with or [gasp] for in future employment.

These tips are hardly a definitive guide for transitioning from one job to another, but they’ve worked for me, so hopefully others may find them useful.

*** The “walk in the snow” reference alludes to the tale of how former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau took a long walk during a snow storm the night before he resigned from his position of leader of the Liberal Party in 1984. I’ve come to use the phrase “walk in the snow” to describe the decision to quit something, like a job.