3 month notice period

Short answer I'd imagine is your contract is what you signed.

However contracts can be amended if both parties are in agreement.

If you want to leave and have something lined up talk to your line manager/hr they can often be very facilitating and release you from contract early.

Your colleague might have negotiated the shorter notice period when they joined.

Generally I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you leave without giving 3 months' notice, the company's only comeback is to sue you for breach of contract, and any costs associated with the reduction in notice. Which is probably next to nothing. They can't withhold your pay or anything like that.

The general principle is that the length of notice must be relevant to the seniority of the role, the difficulty in acquiring new people for that role, and the ability of you to seek another job.

If a company is hiring a junior level person but they're told they'll have to wait 3 months, they'll probably just move onto the next candidate. Thus a 3 month notice period is restrictive and unreasonable. If you're hiring a CEO and he has a 12 month waiting period, you will wait a year for the right person.

So if for your role you think that a 3 month notice period would hinder your ability to move jobs, then just ignore it. When you do get a new job offer, the other company always want to get you in next week, so tell them you have two months' notice and see what they say. If they say they can't wait that long, make it a month and tell your current employer to go shove it. There's little they can actually do about it.

In the meantime, if there's an opportunity to renegotiate your contract (raise, change of hours, change of title, etc), throw in a request to change your notice period to 4 weeks, "in line with my colleagues". HR don't really care, so I can't see why there'd be much resistance unless you have a very specific and hard to hire skillset.

It's actually pretty unusual tbh. Only few industries have the absolute balls on them to stick this sort of nonsense into contracts .

On metric is 3 months fair on a normal employees and equally the notion someone is going to get an opportunity to negotiate this down at interview stage is an interesting take on how interview processes go ... Red flag red flag no job.

Nope, depending on the seniority of the job 3 months can be considered too restrictive and I have yet to see any issues with giving less more reasonable notice for any normal mid level position - 2 months max. Terms in employment contracts can be deemed too restrictive by wrc such as non compete clauses which give too long or too long distance covered.