Be professional, serious, sincere and calm. Explain that you are leaving to persue other career options. Be vague and don't mention the name of your new employer.

Don't act like an adolescent ass; you don't want to burn any bridges, you never know when you'll run into these people again.

thanks Dan, unfortunately i already did it...and I did blurt out the name of my new employer. i don't know how that can hurt really, what are the reasons for not wanting to do that? fortunately i did not burn any bridges...in fact we are going to work out a way for me to be a potential rendering/modelling outsource for them.

so you did punch him in the gut then?
outstanding.

I highly recommend when quitting to sit at your computer and delete the network drives....that'll really get you out the door in a hurry!!!

DJ-

i tried the network drives idea...that didn't work out so well, i almost got to the door but they caught me and proceeded with the beating...who'da thought every one of my colleagues had a sock full of quarters just waiting to be put to good use.

thanks-
cappy

HEY EO WHERE'D YOU WORK?

do it rick james style and step all over their couch grinding your boots all into the leather.

you might need a recomendation letter from this employer in the future, so don't punch him

You'd be surprised how small this industry is. If you stay in the same city, you'll probably run into your old boss and co workers again. You may, one day, need a job from one of your co workers. So you want them to remember you in a good light, not as a punk kid who makes a scene.

just stop wearing clothes into the office. it always gets me asked to leave, and some times it gets me dates!!

when quitting a job, you want to be sure not to burn any bridges. simply tell your boss that you are looking into something else. you will want to keep your old boss at arms length for future reference, however. i routinely communicate with people from my old office (and alma mater) even going out to lunch with them once and a while. your boss will understand; he's a business man and they are used to this.

"though if you move on in less than a year, or if you have more than 3 or 4 jobs in your first 5 to 6 years, not counting student jobs, then you may actually hurt your mid-career prospects."

this is a quote from another thread and now it has me a little worried for my future prospects, goals, aspirations, etc. I have two years experience out of school. 1 year experience with a small boutique firm which ended up screwing me in the end, promised to give health insurance after three months....didn't, promised a raised in year, laid me off at 11 months. the next year i got a job w/ a mid-sized firm doing corporate type projects, has treated me well(relatively), not extremely stisfying work, but i set a personal goal to leave town after two years out of school...hence, new job and new city. in addition to this i have extensive experience in 4 separate firms during my school years. is any of this going to hurt me in the future? should i be worried bout it at this point?

captain EO: since I'm the perpetrator of that quote, let me reply:
first: I don't think jobs during school years "count" toward one's flakiness rating. If anything I think more jobs during school is often benefit - kind of like a job-sampler to get ideas of how things work in different firms and what kind of work you might like to do.
second: I think when I wrote that in the other thread I followed it with comments about people with 17 jobs in 15 years. THAT is a big problem. But job-hopping interns are quite common and it isn't usually held against them - unless they've repeatedly lasted 6 months or something like that...

The thing is that the question WILL come up as to why you followed this path. You can truthfully answer that you're looking for a new experience in a new city. You can truthfully say you were laid off -because of a slowdown in work for example. These answers won't raise red flags for an intern applicant - they're typcial. You absolutely do NOT want to say anything negative about former employees - or anything about what they promised but didn't deliver.

A shakier answer is when an intern says that the firm was a bad fit and that he and the firm "mutually decided" that he didn't belong there - because this usually means he was fired (or pressured to quit.)

The job-hopping thing becomes more of a problem after the first 5 to 6 years - at which point employees become more expensive, their expertise more specialized, etc, so that it is more and more expensive to hire people and get them "settled in."

Anyway, my own history includes 5 student jobs and 5 "real" firm jobs - and while I frequently got the questions about WHY I'd done this it didn't seem to be a major concern or prevented hiring.