Kate Crowhurst
Money Bite-Size Read:
- Today as many as 85% of us don’t feel engaged at work.
- Life is too short to spend your life being unhappy with your career choices.
- Here’s how to end up in a job you’ll hate, to help you with moving towards finding a job you love.
The Money Bites Take:
By showing you the decisions that might lead you into doing a job you hate, we want you instead to make decisions that will lead you to a job you’ll love going to do each day.
No one applies for a job they know they’ll hate.
You work hard in school and undertake your exams with a job in mind. Ideally, the job you end up doing would reflect that effort and be a career you find rewarding.
However, only 15% of us feel engaged at work.
That means a whopping 85% of us are disengaged from the work we do. This means the majority of the world’s one billion full-time workers don’t love what they do. COVID-19 brought also hating your job into focus as it forced us to reassess our priorities, including work.
If money wasn’t an issue, what would you do with your time?
That’s a question that many of us need to ask when applying for jobs. We often get sidetracked with other concerns and become one of the 85% disengaged rather than the lucky 15% engaged in our work. No job is worth being miserable for, but it’s all too easy to get stuck in a job you hate.
Sometimes you will need to do a job you don’t love to pay the bills and there’s no shame in that. Unfortunately, we also often settle for soul-destroying jobs we hate because it becomes too difficult and scary to take a leap of faith towards the unknown. By showing you how to end up in a job you’ll hate, we can then highlight what’s important in selecting a career and help you end up in a role you love.
Here’s how to end up in a job you’ll hate:
1. Choose your job based on what career pays the most
Many of us equate work satisfaction with your starting salary. Simply look up the highest-paid starting salaries each year and go with the highest salary you can. However, this approach often doesn’t lead to happiness. In fact, 66% of us value happiness at work over money, remaining in the role due to added expectations like reliance on a salary. Across all ages and salary groups, most of us want more meaning at work and would sacrifice our salary to find more meaning at work.
2. Pick something that sounds cool to say at parties
The expectations of others often push us to pick a career to impress others. A good test of this is whether you’d pick a job because it would be good to say at parties. You may choose a career like law or medicine because it impresses people or meets family expectations. Unless you’d actually enjoy doing those work tasks every day, you have to consider whether those perceived expectations are worth your unhappiness.
3. Pick the easiest job you can find
Many of us resist a challenge, and instead, we pick a job that comes easy and doesn’t ask too much of us. The problem with this approach is that feeling challenged also keeps us engaged and growing at work. Challenge can be good for us as a quarter of us believe we would improve our mental health if we switched jobs.
4. Don’t research a company’s values
A company’s values are normally included on a job advert or on their website. You can also get a sense of a company’s values from your interactions with their staff and what you can read about them online. Knowing and feeling aligned with a company’s values means that you can feel proud of where you go to work each day and means you can work towards implementing these values each day.
5. Make sure your boss is a robot
Many of us are so focused on the job we do that we forget who we’ll be working for. Your boss is the person you report to each day, so they need to be someone you can work with. For example, one in 10 of us dislike our work because of a lack of praise. If you need daily praise, make sure you take a job working for a boss who gives daily praise.
6. Be influenced only by what you see on TV
Many TV shows are based in or around the workplace. However, their depictions of work and particular professions aren’t always accurate. Not all doctors look like models and date other doctors in their lunch break. Not all lawyers wear designer clothes and live in penthouse apartments. Make sure you question what you see on TV before you pick a job in that world.
7. Ignore your passion
Many of us have something we love doing so much that you would work for free. Your friends and family tell you that you should consider making it your full-time career or starting a side hustle. But you ignore them as many people do. People don’t look for their passion because they haven’t experienced what it is to follow their passion. Following your passion means a better chance of happiness at work which is worth taking a chance on.
If you’re spending huge amounts of your life energy at work, shouldn’t that be time well spent at a job you like?
Work is non-negotiable for many of us, even those seeking to retire early. By showing you how to end up in a job you’ll hate, we want you to take steps to find work you love doing. Life is too short to spend your whole career in the wrong job.
