The Job You Already Have Could Be The Job You Want (With a Few Tweaks)

I was sitting on a bus chatting with a couple. The husband is a software engineer like me, and his wife is a nurse who teaches nursing at a college in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“In the classes I teach,” she said, “I teach the material that a nurse needs to know to get certified, but I also try to teach them about what it really means to be a nurse, because you can have all the knowledge about nursing, but if you don’t get it, you will never survive in this field.”

By coincidence, just a few days before I had listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, Dream Jobs. The host, Shankar Vedantam, interviewed Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski (rez-NESS-key) about her research into work satisfaction.

One of her investigations involved the university hospital cleaning crew, studying the nature and meaning of their work. They asked the workers to describe their job, how much skill they thought it required, how much they enjoyed it, etc.

What they found was that there was a group that stood out. They enjoyed the work, they found it deeply meaningful, they thought of the work as very highly skilled. When asked to describe the tasks and relationships that comprise the work, they talked about completely different things from the official list of job tasks and responsibilities that were provided by the organization.

This segment differed from the rest in how they looked beyond the tasks of their official duties to connect with the larger mission of the hospital — to be healers and provide patient care, even if that meant spending some extra time with patients who were especially distraught or who had not had many visitors that week.

“Yes! That’s exactly right!” proclaimed my bus companion. “It’s one thing to know what to do and how to do it, but I try to make my students understand how it connects to caring for patients. This is a stressful field. There are often long hours under difficult work conditions. You can’t keep up at it without burning out unless you understand how what you do matters.”

By teaching the nursing students how to find meaning in their work, the instructor is not only helping them how to be happier and cope better with the challenges of the nursing profession, but she is also helping them be better nurses. It might not have been an official part of the curriculum, but training better nurses obviously fulfills the school’s larger mission.

This idea of going off-script to customize your job to better reflect your strengths and interests and to better serve the higher goals is something that Wrzesniewski termed job crafting.

She studied workers on the cleaning crew in part because it’s the kind of low-paying low-skill job that most people would not imagine themselves finding rewarding. Yet, Wrzesniewski found that some workers deployed the strategies of job crafting that changed their attitude about their job.

Job crafting not only benefited the workers by making their job more enjoyable and meaningful, but it also benefited the hospital and the patients because they tended to do a better job.

Wrzesniewski argues that the wisdom of job crafting can be applied to any work situation. Typically, the best strategy for finding satisfying work is not to look for the perfect work situation, but rather to find ways to mold your current job to connect with the value of the work you already do.

How do you do this?

Managing Yourself: Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want: Describes a job crafting exercise for reorganizing the elements of your job to better suit your motives, strengths, and passions. This involves assessing and then altering one or more of the following core aspects of work: tasks, relationships, and perceptions.

Following the job crafting process can help you make the best of the job that you already have. But it's not only about making the best of your current situation. Going through the process of clarifying your strengths, interests, and what you find meaningful will help you realize what actually matters to you about your work. When choosing a new job, you can then focus on choosing the opportunity that holds the most potential for allowing you to pursue the areas that are best suited to you.

For further reading:

If you enjoyed this post, I have written a follow-up post that includes more about this topic and the work of Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski: DON’T Follow Your Passion

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Thanks for reading. Please like and share. You can find my previous LinkedIn articles here (https://www.dhirubhai.net/today/author/davidpmax).

Amy Wrzesniewski: LinkedIn profile

Cover art: Medical Center of the Rockies recognized as nation’s cleanest hospital