Rowan Manahan gives his expert view on job melancholy - and says research shows three-quarters of people who quit jobs do so for reasons other than salary

Remember that awful feeling as a child when you had a teacher whom you hated? In my house, we used to call it "Monday morning-itis". One message from this year's Leaving Cert students is that they look forward to not dreading going to school anymore. If only they knew!

All over the country, grown-ups are feeling the same Monday morning-itis; and many have been feeling it for years. If you are not looking forward to the full-on grind now the summer is over, if you are thinking about moving job this autumn, rest assured that you are not alone.

The recruitment industry in Ireland is now worth over a billion euro and handles hundreds of thousands of temporary and full-time appointments per year.

The Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment registered more than 23,000 redundancies in 2004. There is plenty of movement in the jobs market for lots of reasons. We all know about the positive reasons for moving on: better career path, more money, bigger car. But what about the negatives?

Research from the Small Firms Association showed almost 75 per cent of private sector workers who had moved in the preceding 12 months were quitting for reasons other than salary.

Add to that that the figure of the Health and Safety Authority now dealing with 360,000 bullying queries per year.

How many Lotto winners stick with the day job? Gallup Consulting's research has conclusively demonstrated that engaged, happy employees are healthier in every aspect of their lives; while over half of those who are disengaged from their work say their workplace has a negative effect on their health.

Why all this unhappiness? In a word, because of lies. People lie, exaggerate, distort and misrepresent. Organisations spin, embellish and, according to George Bush, "disassemble".

Orwell said society was "founded on a system of organised lying" and he was not wrong. Napoleon said the surest way to remain poor was to be an honest man, and he was probably not wide of the mark either.

Now don't get me wrong; I am happy to imply that the squawking pink blob that I have been handed is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen, and I will cheerfully eat sacrificial burnt offerings washed down with cooking vinegar and tell my hosts they are delicious.

But lying in the jobs market? In this day and age? That's just stupid.

Wanted: Machine Operator. Must be 1.98m (6ft 5ins) tall, left-handed, fluent in Mandarin and Spanish with a high degree of manual dexterity and 100wpm typing speed.

I have never seen a job advertisement quite that specific, but from reading it, I can tell you that there would be no point in applying unless you had all the attributes specified. And yet people misrepresent themselves to the market every day.

Companies do exactly the same - offering training, advancement and incentives which somehow never quite materialise. Baaaaad idea! It's like lying in the personals ad and expecting the relationship to last. It can't and it won't.

So if you have that colicky sensation as you face into a long autumn and winter in your current job, it is time to ask yourself why. Ultimately, it doesn't matter who is the fibber, what matters is lessening the stress. Work used to be a pain in the neck - back pain was the number one cause of workplace absenteeism. Now, work has become a pain in the head as stress is the primary occupational hazard in the 21st century. The world is hectic enough. Why invite more stress into your life because of your day job?

Unless you have a long-forgotten aunt who is going to bequeath you her logging company, your job is likely to be your sole source of revenue. As such, you need to nurture and protect it - and make sure that it is doing you no harm. Right now, what does your gut tell you?

Move or stay? If it's stay, well and good; if it's move, then it is time to dust off the good suit and get the CV out of the bottom drawer.

My key piece of advice to any job-seeker in 2005 is to take your time. Unless you have a pressing financial need to get a new job tomorrow, take the time to prepare yourself, research the market thoroughly and make sure that the next move is the right one, with a good fit - you for them and them for you.

Modern job-hunting is all about the application of knowledge. With the surging growth of the internet, that knowledge is not hard to come by and organisations now have very high expectations as to candidates' preparedness and level of research. That part of the job-hunt is tedious but relatively painless to accomplish. What is more difficult is ensuring that the human resources manager isn't doing a Mata Hari job on you.

Rowan Manahan is managing director of employment consultancy Fortify Services in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin