Danger at work! We recently completed a pilot survey on people’s attitude to their jobs. This small-scale project was designed to help us refine our questionnaire and make sure we were getting the good quality feedback we need to help us develop our business.
Once we’re satisfied our methodology is working the way we want, we’ll expand the study to include more respondents.
After all, we offer tuition in business communication and basic business practice, so it’s important our tutorials match the needs of our world-wide subscribers.
The results were startling
Making broad judgements based on a relatively small sample is not good research practice, yet we found the negative view most people have of their jobs surprising and extraordinary.
Two-thirds of those who completed our questionnaire were negative. Let’s be clear: our respondents were aged 18-44, living in major cities in America and earning up to $100,000 a year. So there are obviously a healthy number of middle and some senior managers and professionals included in our sample.
The most common complaint? Boredom
This fact alone raises many questions.
Let’s go back to when these young people were at school or college. Did they leave with the skills and the confidence necessary to hack it in the workplace? What kind of advice did they get regarding their careers? Did they do enough research of their own to find out about different jobs in different fields? Or do they all want to be video game designers?
Hopefully our full-scale study will give us some clues.
Meanwhile, what can you do if you’re bored at work?
Find something you’re passionate about. Maybe you like to build model boats or breed butterflies or bake and decorate cakes.
If waking up in the morning and thinking about going to work makes you miserable, what would get you bounding out of the house with a spring in your step? The chances are you already know what you’re passionate about, you just haven’t accepted it yet.
“Okay, so I like looking after horses. How can I make enough doing that to pay the bills?” If you haven’t thought about it or tried, it you’ll never know.
“Oh but my parents want me to be a dentist.” Well, if staring at people’s rotting teeth all day isn’t your idea of a fun job, remind your folks that it’s your life, not theirs.
Also, remember that no job is one fun-filled hour followed by another for fifty hours a week.
Sometimes the people you work with drive you nuts and there’s always a part of every job that nobody looks forward to.
Finally, look at your skills
Maybe you find the industry or profession you’re in interesting enough but your job is not as satisfying as you’d like.
Learn something new or polish up your current skills so that your employer can see you’re ready for a bigger challenge.
You’re going to be spending thousands of hours working unless you win the lottery. You may as well enjoy it.
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