Think about a time when a job or class, if you are still in school, was an issue, not because it was a bad situation but because something didn’t seem right. Maybe it was a toxic culture, but you weren’t 100% sure why some people were more upset about the situation than others. While not the answer, career values can give you a lot of insight into why some people enjoy a specific job in your field whereas others hate it.
Understanding your career values can take some of the mystery out of job hunting. When looking at a posting, you can look beyond the list of requirements and see what the company might be offering you in return. During the interview process, it helps you to determine what questions to ask the interviewer to determine if the job will be the right fit for you.
You’ve probably heard stories of people getting their “dream job” and still being miserable. This often occurs because of a mismatch between what they think they value, what they thought the job would be, and their values. You could rewrite the saying “if you follow your passion, you’ll never have to work again” as “the closer a job aligns to your values, the more enjoyable it will be.”
When we look at our jobs, there are a lot of different aspects to them. Things like pay, culture, and job duties vary greatly between companies, even in the same industry, and often between teams at the same company. Career values are how much we care about these different aspects. Things like pay and promotions factor into this, but it goes deeper.
There are several different ways to divide up types of career values, but a simple option is intrinsic, extrinsic, and lifestyle.
Intrinsic values generally refer to things that affect how you think about yourself. There isn’t any tangible external benefit to them, but we still believe they are essential. Things like autonomy and being creative are in this category, as are leadership and collaboration. An example might be trading a higher salary for the opportunity to work from home and set your schedule.
Extrinsic values affect our relationship with others or provide some material value. This category will include money, promotions, influence, and job security. When we think of industries like finance, we often see jobs that skew heavily towards extrinsic rewards.
Lifestyle values are arguably included in the other two categories, but since they focus on life outside of work and are often forgotten when we look at what we value in our work. A “boring” job that leaves you with the time, energy, and money to pursue the things you enjoy has its type of value. A typical example of this in the tech industry is game development. Large studios are notoriously toxic and pay poorly because of the demand for those jobs. Instead, we have more and more indie devs who build their games solo or in a small team while working a bland 9-5 job that doesn’t demand much from them.
| One of the best ways to do this is sitting down with a list of options and ranking them, like the worksheets in #careers | resources. You can also find similar tools online like this one: https://www.icscareers.com.au/card-sort/. Working with some form of cards (digital or physical) is a popular choice because they are easy to group and reorder. |
This process is time-consuming and does require sorting out what you value over what you think you should value, based on expectations from culture, family, and friends.
There are probably some things that you know you value and some that you know you don’t, with a bunch in the middle. If you are using cards, you could start by grouping them into those three groups without worrying about the specific order. This alone can tell you a lot about what you care about, but for the things that are in the important category, you may want to dig deeper, since there’s a good chance you will have to choose between them in future jobs.
Trying to decide between two abstract concepts can be tough, but you might have more luck thinking of places in your own life you’ve made these choices and how you did it. Are you happy with that choice? Do you wish you’d chosen differently? If there were more money or more vacation or whichever item you are considering, how would that have affected your choice? If you can’t think of a time this was an issue, then try to imagine one.
Now that you know what is important to you, you can leverage that tool to improve your work situation. It’s much easier to pass up a raise in favor of better hours when you know that will make you happier. It is theoretically possible to have everything in your job, but that isn’t realistic. Instead, we make tradeoffs- money versus time, autonomy versus reliable income, etc.
Taking a job that doesn’t properly align isn’t a mistake- it may be necessary for some reason, or the job isn’t exactly what it was advertised, or any number of reasons. Instead, it can be an opportunity to reassess your values and experience you can use to obtain a job that is a better fit.