by Rena Sherwood

Created on: February 17, 2010

Resignation letters are the easiest bits of business paperwork to write.  Anyone caught in a lousy job writes several per day inside of his or her own head.  The ease of which they can be written can land a soon-to-be-ex-employee into trouble.  You may need to ask a favour of your former employers in the future (such as for a reference) but they will not be inclined to do that if you dropped off a nasty resignation letter.

This is why there are many great examples of resignation letters or resignation letter templates on the web.  They help you know just how much you are legally required to say without getting into any hot water.  Websites are also much more up to date on the current business etiquette than books are.  Here, in no particular order, are some of the best spots on the web to find resignation letter examples.

About.com

Ever try to get a writing job at About.com?  Good luck!  It's this stringent writer selection process that makes the content on About.com so valuable.  Granted, sometimes the "articles" are nothing but a page of links to other websites – but these are valuable, vetted lists that saves you the time of trying to find them yourself.  You can find many examples and top link lists on Tech Careers and Job Search categories in About.com. 

The link above is from the Job Search category, which lists more types of resignation letter examples than you ever thought possible.  There are resignation letter examples for many types of circumstances, including resigning due to health reasons, resigning without giving the traditional two-week notice and (my favourite) thanking the employer and offering to help train a replacement in the brief you time you have left with the company.

Monster.com

Monster.com specialises in employment, job search, networking and how to ditch one job in order to get a better one.  Although there are several pages about resignation letters on Monster.com, I chose this concise one-screen how to from Monster Resume Expert Kim Isaacs.  It pretty much does all of the writing for you, except signing your name.

IResign.com

This website is similar to IQuit.com, but that website was down at the time of this writing.  Anyway, this website does exactly what it says.  It walks you through all of the aspects of deciding to and actually leaving your job, including a salary calculator and hints that your boss may soon let your go.  IResign.com also loads faster than About.com on this writer's ancient Gateway PC.  The best part is that it offers already written resignation letter examples.  It's sort of the "Mad Libs" version of resignation letter examples.

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