Your Ability to Understand This Puzzling Statement Could Help You Maximize Your Future Occupational Success
A good way to decide if you should read this blog is to determine how well your beliefs about your future career and your current education agree with the following quotes from the results of a Gallup poll of more than 30,000 college graduates across the United States who rated both the importance of their future occupations and the importance of the role their college education will play in helping them to achieve their occupational aspirations.
“Having a good job is one of the most important factors in life because it occupies an enormous amount of people’s time and self-identity”
“When thinking about the ultimate outcome of a college degree, there is almost universal agreement about the value people seek and expect: to increase the probability of getting a good job and having a better life”
If you agree with these statements, I invite you to continue reading this blog and to use its contents to engage in some serious self-reflection about what you believe is the purpose of the work you will perform when you are employed and how this purpose will determine the meaning and satisfaction you derive from the work you do.
What is the definition of a good job, how many people in the world have a good job, and what is the difference between a good job and a great job?
Gallup defines a good job as “30+ hours per week of consistent work with a paycheck from an employer.” Using this definition, Gallup’s first World Poll found that only 26% (1.3 billion of the world’s 5 billion adults) have a good job. While these results help us to know the number of people whose jobs meet these criteria, they provide no information about how these people rate the quality of these jobs. The Gallup pollsters addressed this crucial deficiency by creating a conceptual metric titled “employee engagement” that allowed them to group workers into three categories (engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged) on the basis of the extent to which they reported that they:
- used their strengths at work,
- knew what was expected of them on-the-job, and
- believed their jobs mattered in some important way.
Gallup used the term “great job” to describe occupations in which employees reported they experienced all three of these criteria. Unfortunately, only 14% of the people Gallup surveyed who reported they had good jobs could also be categorized as possessing great jobs when these criteria were applied. These data led Jon Clifton, Gallup’s Managing Director of Global Analytics (2016, p. 1) to come to the following disheartening conclusion. “Out of 5 billion adults on this planet, only 1.3 billion have a good job. Of these 1.3 billion, only 14% are engaged. So out of a global workforce of an estimated 3.2 billion adults who are working or looking for work, only 6% or 183 million have a great job. This means that 3 billion people who want a great job don’t have one. The dream of men and women around the world is to have a good job, and ultimately a great job. Yet fewer than 200 million people are realizing this dream.”
What is the take-home message from Gallup’s results? My interpretation is that the word “good” in the term “good job” is definitely not as good as it sounds after you understand how a good job is defined in the professional, data-based literature (i.e., receiving a consistent paycheck from an employer for at least 30 hours per week). What I assume you really want is a “great job” in which you are fully engaged in your work because you know what is expected of you, you can put your strengths to work on-the-job, and you believe that what you do matters in some way that is important to you. Now that you understand that the word “good” is really not as good as it sounds when it is used to describe a job, it is time to turn your attention to the meaning of the word “job,” and then compare a job with first a “career” and then a “calling.”
What are the differences between a job, a career, and a calling?
Undergraduate psychology programs have not always provided the same level of support for their students who seek to enter the job market after they graduate as they have for their students who wish to enter graduate school to become psychologists (Appleby, 2018). Thankfully this unfortunate situation is changing. Two indicators of this transformation have been the publication of An Online Career Exploration Resource for Psychology Majors that identifies and describes 300 jobs that psychology majors can prepare to enter both with and without a graduate degree and the creation of a set of job-related skills that psychology majors will need to succeed with a bachelor’s degree in the 21st century workplace. These resources can help you become more “job savvy” by helping you understand the jobs you can prepare to enter and the skills you will need to obtain and succeed in these jobs. However, they do not provide you with a method to discover something very important about yourself—namely, what do you believe is the purpose of the work you will do in the occupation you eventually enter—which is the intent of this blog. In essence, this belief boils down to how you will answer the following crucial question after you have become employed:
“Why do I work?”
Your answer will almost surely place you into one of the following three orientations to work (i.e., a job, a career, or a calling) that have been empirically verified by the research of Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, and Schwartz (1997).
- If you ask people with a job orientation why they work, they will say that the purpose of their job is to earn enough money to afford what they want when they are not at work (e.g., to provide a comfortable and safe life for their family and to engage in the hobbies and activities they enjoy). They prefer jobs that do not interfere with their personal lives, and they are unlikely to report a strong attachment to their employers or a genuine sense of satisfaction from performing the duties their jobs require. They say “Thank God it’s Friday” often, look forward to retirement with great joy and, if they won the lottery, they would quit their jobs immediately and never work again.
- If you ask people with a career orientation why they work, their answers will most likely focus on the types of opportunities their jobs provide them to achieve greater success or prestige in the form of raises or promotions to higher levels of leadership and—if they are honest—the high social standing they perceive their occupation provides them. If they won the lottery, they would most likely keep working as long as they believe their job provides opportunities to continue to climb the corporate ladder. The ability to achieve greater success appears to the motive that keeps them in one job or causes them to move to another.
- If you ask people with a calling orientation why they work, their answer will help you understand that they view their work as an integral part of both their lives and their identities because it allows them to experience a true sense of self-expression and personal fulfillment. These individuals find their work to be genuinely meaningful because it allows them to achieve their purpose, whatever that may be. In other words, they have engaged in enough self-reflection to form an accurate idea of what they want to accomplish during their lives, and have either found a career that will help them to do this or have been able to modify their jobs so they are a better fit for their interests, strengths, and values. If they won the lottery, individuals with a calling orientation would be unlikely to quit their jobs because they would say that they are doing exactly want to do when they go to work each day. They also tend to be hesitant about retirement because they know it will deprive them of their ability to experience the on-the-job activities that have provided them with purpose and meaning to their lives for such a long time.
None of these orientations is superior to the others. They all reflect perfectly normal human motives (e.g., to provide for the basic needs and safety of families, to gain recognition for work well done, and to identify and fulfill the ultimate purpose of one’s life), which are reminiscent of four of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (i.e., physiological, safety, esteem, and self-actualization). Neither are they exclusive. A person with a calling orientation will also want to care for her family and value an occasional pay raise. However, according to Wrzesniewsky, McCauley, Rozin, and Schwartz (1997), individuals with a calling orientation tend to be more satisfied with both their work and their lives, perhaps because they are more likely to find ways to transform their duties and develop new work relationships in ways that enable them to experience their work as more meaningful and purpose-driven.
You may have already decided which orientation you possess but, if not, I invite you to visit the University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness website where you can register to take the Work-Life Questionnaire. Knowing your work orientation can help you to:
- make more informed decisions about occupations that may be the best fit for you,
- better understand colleagues whose orientations are different from yours, and
- help you to understand and manage others more successfully in the future.
How can you use “Appleby’s Maxims” to identify and prepare for an occupation that will provide you with a sense of purpose, fulfillment, engagement, and energy?
Many years ago I was interviewed for an article in the APA Monitor titled Words to Work By: Appleby’s Maxims in which I explained how I shared the following three pithy quotations with my students to help them navigate their path to career success.
- “Know thyself.” As Socrates suggested more than 2,000 ago, conduct a serious self-examination to determine your skills, characteristics, goals, interests, and values.
- “To thine own self be true.” As Polonius advised Laertes in the second act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, determine what career you would like to enter based on what you know about yourself, and then create an action plan to reach that goal.
- “Just do it.” As directed by Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (speaking through her 21st-century corporate namesake), put your plan into action now, not later.
I hope this blog has helped you begin the process of “knowing thyself” more accurately by enabling you to determine the kind of orientation to the world of work you possess. There is an abundance of information available about the types of jobs for which you can prepare and the skills you will need to enter and succeed in them. But without a clear understanding of what you want to “get out” of your job (i.e., your job orientation), you may wake up one day and find yourself wondering why the “good job” you thought you had is not particularly “good for you.”
References
Appleby, D. C. (2018). Preparing psychology majors to enter the workforce: Then, now, with whom, and how [Special Section – Career Issues and the Psychology Major]. Teaching of Psychology, 45(1), 14–23. doi:10.1177/0098628317744944
Gallup. (2014). Great jobs great lives. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/opcdamabassadors/gallup-purdueindex-report2014050514mhlr-35580148
Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C. R., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, careers, and callings: People’s relations to their work. Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 21-33.
