We’ve all heard the saying ‘Do a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,’ but how do we go about finding that job in the first place?
That’s the million-dollar question we’re going to answer today with the help of Lara Plaxton, entrepreneur, career changer, and founder of GotDis, a platform committed to helping early careerists with career development and determining their future careers.
She has a mind-boggling answer - and it’s two words: ‘Job crafting.’
What does job crafting mean, and why is it important?
“Job crafting is a newer concept which describes taking a proactive approach to self-managing your career through understanding your underlying motivations, your skill capability, your current priorities and future aspirations,” Lara explains.
First, she shares the history of the term job crafting: “It originated from research carried out by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton in 2001. They recognised that enabling employees to shape their roles to include aspects that they gain enjoyment from allows them to feel empowered at work, connect more positively with colleagues and be more engaged and satisfied within their role.”
In short, job crafting aims to enhance the employee experience by allowing individuals to make adjustments to their roles in a way that aligns with their needs, beyond job descriptions.
They identified three types of job crafting:
- Changing task boundaries (volume, frequency, type) through task crafting, which involves making adjustments to responsibilities and tasks to enhance job satisfaction and effectiveness.
- Changing relational boundaries (interactions, relationships, network) through relational crafting, which focuses on altering workplace relationships with co-workers, and fostering new ones to enhance productivity.
- Changing cognitive task boundaries (purpose, meaning, impact) which is also known as cognitive crafting.
Lara explains: “To gain the most fulfilment from work, it’s important that those carrying out the work can help shape it in different ways to enjoy their role more. This in turn helps an employee to be more productive, improves their wellbeing and creates better job satisfaction, ultimately increasing retention.”
While traditional job design focuses on managerial control and organisation, job crafting encourages employee engagement and proactivity in shaping one’s work experience beyond job demands.
How can people ‘job-craft’ for their career?
“Jobs shouldn’t be looked at in a vacuum. It’s important to consider how it fits with career goals, work/life priorities and the future of the job market, as these factors will influence career decisions,” Lara warns.
In order to begin job crafting, Lara suggests completing the following activity
1. Map out the below in a notebook of choice:
- Skills you enjoy using and feel competent in
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Work that gives you motivation, and the reason why
- Types of people interactions that energise you
- Personal commitments outside of work that are priorities
- Current and long-term career aspirations
2. Offer evidence:
“Career crafting requires you to have a good level of self-awareness so you can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses, or areas for development. Where possible, you should try and back up your assumptions about your strengths and weaknesses with practical examples from your experience,” Lara advises.
It might be helpful to find resources online, such as a job crafting questionnaire, to spark your thinking.
3. Ask a friend:
She recommends speaking to managers, peers, connections and mentors to gain a more holistic view of your capabilities.
“You may find that some areas that you considered a weakness are just skills that you enjoy the least, but actually have a good level of competency in,” she shares.
“Once this is completed, it is easier to see how your map fits with your current job, and where the gaps are.”
Implementing job crafting in your career change
If you have the scope to make changes to your current role, to ‘craft’ it into something more aligned with your goals, that’s brilliant. However, if, through this activity, you realise that your current job isn’t for you, you now have a clearer indication of the kind of role, responsibilities and environments you would like to work in to inform your potential career change.
“Traditional career advice has always focused on aiming for a certain job title within your chosen career field. But, what if you’re unsure about what your ideal job is?” Lara asks. Nowadays, a career can take several forms.
With 1 in 4 UK workers reporting career unhappiness and 1 in 3 considering a career change in the next year, there’s never been a more important time to realign yourself and your personal needs with your career goals.
“There is likely to be more than one job to aim for, which will help to widen your expectations and be more open minded about new opportunities,” Lara says.
Measuring the list of ideal jobs against your skills, strengths and weaknesses will help you to track down, or begin building, your dream career so that you too, can have a job you love.
If you’re considering a move that involves changing careers, why not have a conversation with one of our business managers to see whether financial advice might be a good next career step for you?
The St. James’s Place Financial Adviser Academy is an award-winning career change programme that trains people to become financial advisers. Fill out our contact form to start a conversation, or download our brochure for more information.
Click here to learn more about the GotDis platform or to contact Lara herself.