Ask any job-applicant what he would like to see in a job, good pay, lots of benefits or the chance to work in a well-known company. The chances are that he will opt for working in a company of repute, assuming that his other expectations will follow, plus the privilege and honor working in an esteemed environment.

However, sometimes it is detrimental to your career path to work in such prestigious climes and it’s better to overlook a big company where the job is not right and get one that suits your passions better.

A worker, who used to work for a company listed among the best companies to work for by Fortune Magazine, quit her job, saying that even though the company was renowned for their work culture she was feeling stifled and not enjoying her work. The company was exciting, she said, but the job wasn’t.

She said there were many reasons why she quit and she made the decision after a lot of deliberation and thought. She said that the prime reason was that she was academically qualified to be a Business Analyst and was hoping that it would get her a leadership position a few years down the line. Her current job was not enabling her to learn the nuances of human resources.

In big companies the opportunities to learn are limited, because they already are so big that there will be nothing new for you to contribute. Moreover, everything at a big company works in clockwork fashion and everything is mechanical and motorized.

Everything at the big company will be well organized and in line, well thought-out and consistent and the worker could end up finding himself a minor link of the established job-chain.

Even though big companies have their advantages, when it comes from the learning point of view, there is much more to be learnt from a small company than it is to learn from a big company.

When you are at a job, however high paying it may be that does not teach you new skills, it tends to become monotonous and a feeling of stagnancy will prevent you from enjoying it. On the contrary if you are at a job, even it is not as high-profile as the one in a big company, and you are acquiring knowledge that you can take away from it, then you will enjoy your job and the skills you acquire will only make you a more valuable asset to your workplace or any other new career path that you may choose.

Another employer who quit his job at a very highly rated company said that it was a myth that these companies treated their employees very well. Employees were an expendable commodity and the moment their utility diminished or they found someone worthier, the employee was given the stick.

He said he worked in a company for a decade when he was told that there were chances that he could be laid off. For the next few months he sweated hard to ensure that he would not get the axe. Unfortunately he was fired as were few others of his colleagues, who had joined the company around the same time as he had.

It was later on found that they were given the sack, not because they had been rendered redundant but because fresh engineer graduates were available to fill their places at half the salary and probably twice the speed.

The employee said that his sacking was a blessing in disguise inasmuch as the new job that he got offered him a cool $20,000 higher than what he was paid at his former place of employment and the working hours were much less than the 60 hour week that he slogged at – too high a price to pay for the tag of working in a high-profile company.