The newspaper «The guardian» looked at nine different surveys conducted to find the occupations that make us happiest, and then did their own survey of these surveys, looking for the professions that appeared most often in the top 10 of each study.
Interestingly, they didn’t discover a link between a high salary and happiness.
The occupations that ranked highest are:
– Engineer
– Teacher
– Nurse
– Medical practitioner
– Gardener
– Construction worker
– Personal assistant
So what, in fact, does make a job a happy one?
Sure, each person is different, but you can find a few common patterns. They’ve interviewed people from this occupations, you can read the details here. In conclusion we can outline a few major factors of happiness in a job:
| What makes you happy at work | Examples |
| Achievement | Realizing that you build, get, or improve something, or that you change the world |
| Helping others | Feeling you give something, that you make a difference for someone’s life or happiness, or that you make other people grow or learn |
| Relating to others | Being with people, belonging to a team, cooperating, sharing, being connected |
| Discovery | Learning or creating new things, jobs that are always different, finding new solutions, adventure, feeling free to do things your way |
Can we foster these factors also in other jobs? A few companies and leaders are doing it more or less instinctively. Let’s make it on purpose.
