How to find fulfillment at work and in your career

Immersing yourself in the worlds of job searches and careers makes you question a lot of your beliefs about work. A person can easily become cynical about almost every aspect of the world of work when they have to constantly hear about people’s struggles to get hired or the challenges they face when trying to get ahead. I put in a lot of effort to prevent myself from becoming a pessimist about work — yours and my own.

What I’ve developed over the past few years to guide my coverage of job searches and careers are some universal truths. The two most important are:

1. Every person should be able to dictate their relationship with work.
2. Every person can have a job that fulfills their needs.

For example, you don’t have to be defined by your job or spend endless hours at an office. But, you can if that’s what you want. Similarly, regardless of the relationship you set with work, I believe that you don’t have to hate being at your job. You don’t have to love it, but it doesn’t have to make you miserable.

All of this brings me to today’s topic, which is how to find fulfillment in your job. Finding fulfillment is such a huge part of the above idea that your job doesn’t have to make you miserable.

Honestly, there are so many different strategies floating around about finding fulfillment at work. The one I’m most familiar with is something that’s suggested by a lot of job search and career coaches. Specifically, aligning your life’s mission with your job or career.

Mission alignment?

The basis of mission alignment is pretty simple. You take time to find out what you want to accomplish with your life at this moment. Then, you find how your job helps achieve that mission.

You may want to help prevent or slow climate change by introducing more people to green technology, for example. You may think that a mission like that would require you to stand on a busy street corner with a bullhorn shouting about the evils of carbon emissions. You can do that if you want, but it’s obviously not going to put food on your family’s table.

Be realistic about your missions. You can work in sales to get more solar panels installed on residential houses. Heck, you can work at factories that manufacture solar panels. You can work for an electric car company. You can work to reduce the carbon footprint of your current company. There are so many possibilities. Just remember that you don’t have to be on the front lines to make a difference. You could be playing a supporting role with an equally big impact.

In my case, I got into journalism because I want to help inform and educate people about their world so they can make smart choices about their lives. LinkedIn’s (my employer’s) mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. There’s a lot of alignment between the two.

Mission alignment is not always possible when your job doesn’t fit in to what you want to accomplish. You may need to make a larger change and find a career that agrees with what you want to do. In those cases, check out my weekly #GetHired newsletter to learn about finding work and changing careers.

Everyday fulfillment

Before you throw out your career, you could also try smaller adjustments or activities in an attempt to find fulfillment. These are also really useful when you don’t have a mission like the one mentioned above. For example, you may just want a job to provide for your family or support your lifestyle. Those are completely valid missions (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

I turned to the LinkedIn community to learn about their tips and tricks for finding fulfillment at work. You can read all of their suggestions by clicking here.

Rob Kim, who is a career educator and a 2022 LinkedIn Top Voice in Job Search and Careers, offered some really good questions in a response that he uses to check his fulfillment at work. Specifically, he breaks them down into questions about big and little things.

For example, his micro questions are if he enjoys the people he works with, if he has positive interactions with people and if he can see projects taking shape. The bigger — or macro — questions are if he’s contributing to community, if he’s being challenged and can he see the impact of his work.

“These all contribute to career fulfillment,” he wrote.

Your questions may be different, though. You are the only person who holds the recipe to what makes you feel fulfilled. Also, that might change over time or as your circumstances change. The important thing to do is to check in with yourself from time to time to figure out what that recipe is and whether you have all of the ingredients.

How do you find fulfillment at work or in your career? Join the conversation.

? What else do you need to know?

• How can you get that promotion? A lot of people’s career journeys were put on hold due to the pandemic. Some looked elsewhere to grow, but others stayed put hoping their loyalty would pay off as the world recovered. If you’re among this latter group, an executive coach writes in Fast Company that you should be letting your managers and higher-ups know your career goals. Then, when an opportunity comes up, they’ll know you’re interested in moving up. Here’s what people are saying about the advice.
• Is less worth more at work? People trying to solve problems are work often think a new project or something else added to their team’s plate will help. In reality, researchers write in Harvard Business Review that streamlining projects and improving focus on what matters can have a greater effect than adding something new for a team to tackle. Here’s what people are saying about the science.
• Feeling a bit lost in a hybrid world? A lot of companies are venturing into the world of hybrid work for the first time as offices reopen thanks to falling COVID case numbers. You may meet some obstacles as this happens whether you’re at home, at a formal workplace or bouncing between the two. A recent Harvard Business Review article examines some of the challenges you may face and how to tackle them. Here’s what people are saying about the advice.

? Invest in yourself

One of the challenges you may face in a hybrid work environment is waning productivity. For me, I find that I’m most productive when I can bounce between home and the office throughout the week. The change of scenery is important to me. This LinkedIn Learning course can help if you’re struggling with productivity in a hybrid work environment. You can watch the course below or by clicking here.

? Coming up…

The war for talent is heating up among companies. As a result, employers are doing what they can to keep the great talent they already have among their employees. This competitive landscape could make this a great time to ask for a raise or promotion. In the next edition of #GetAhead, we’ll chat about the technique you can use to ask for more at work. If you’ve done this recently, tell me how it went by clicking here.