A Job You Like or a Paycheck You Like?
Sep 24th, 2011 by Kimberly
I love reading the articles that people post on Facebook. It intrigues me to see what other people consider worthy of passing on to others. Granted, Facebook makes it really easy to recommend pieces to the world at large, so you don’t actually have to love it. Depending on the person doing the referring, it may be sage advice or it may deliver one tepid chuckle at the end. I have certainly read a few that inspired no thought besides, “Well, there’s two minutes of my life I’ll never get back,” but that’s the risk you run with most of Facebook.
This week, though, I found one story quite thought-provoking – a piece called “The 10 Happiest Jobs.” (My thanks for posting it, Dominic.) Written by Steve Denning of Forbes, it is linked here courtesy of a Canadian newspaper called the Globe and Mail. (Not sure how exactly it got spread from one to the other. Oh, well, I’ve cited it accurately, I leave you to figure out the rest of that puzzle. We have bigger fish to fry.) It lists the jobs that report the highest amount of overall satisfaction. You can read the article for more in-depth analysis, but here are the winners:
- Clergy
- Firefighters
- Physical Therapists
- Authors (!)
- Special Education Teachers
- Teachers
- Artists
- Psychologists
- Financial Service Sales Agents
- Operating Engineers (people who operate bulldozers, derricks, etc.)
Mr. Denning shows marked surprise at these professions grabbing the top spots, because most of them are not big money-makers. Indeed, only for Number 9, Financial Service Sales Agents, does Mr. Denning mention the paycheck as part of the happiness attained. The article makes me giggle. The author seems seriously bewildered that anyone could be happy doing a job that pays less than six figures. Oh, he tries to make a big deal out of Financial Service Sales Agents earning as much as $90,000 a year, but you can tell his heart’s not in it.
Of course, that may have a lot to do with the intended audience. He wrote the article for Forbes, a business and finance magazine. It’s natural to assume that people buying the publication have an interest in the monetary aspect of things.
It does, however, highlight America’s love/hate relationship with their working life. We feel people should work, and we respect them more if they put in long hours, but we get a little suspicious of anyone who actually enjoys a job. It’s not really work if you like what you’re doing, so why should we pay you for it? If you want to get paid big money, do something that makes you miserable, just like everyone else.
You think I’m kidding? Just look a little further down in Mr. Denning’s article, where he lists the 10 most hated jobs:
- Director of Information Technology
- Director of Sales and Marketing
- Product Manager
- Senior Web Developer
- Technical Specialist
- Electronics Technician
- Law Clerk
- Technical Support Analyst
- CNC Machinist
- Marketing Manager
Several of those job titles come attached to a hefty paycheck, but it doesn’t seem to matter. These people still dread going to work every day. I can understand that. Look at what they have in common: remoteness from the end product. Most of these people work for large companies, and spend their days surrounded by bureaucracy. Their work inevitably begins to feel pointless. They can’t see the effect of what they do.
The ten happiest jobs, on the other hand, put folks in the trenches. Clergy, firefighters, teachers – these folks deal with people every day. Sure, they have days of intense frustration with those people. (Trust me on this one – I am the daughter of two teachers, and I have a couple of friends that are pastors. The why do I even bother? days definitely come.) But the flip side of that coin is that on other days, they change lives for the better. I’m sure they’d all like to make better paychecks than they do – and I’m sure they deserve to – but they don’t need to wait for payday to know that what they do makes a difference. These people save lives, heal hearts, and open minds to new worlds.
It is possible that may be more rewarding than sitting in a meeting, entering data or figuring out how to make a large corporation more money than it made yesterday. Especially in our current economic times, when most of us are reminded at least weekly (if not daily or hourly) that there is a line of people down the block waiting to plant their fannies in our office chair if we complain too much.
Interestingly, the happiest jobs are also the hardest to outsource. Physical therapists, psychologists, bull-dozer drivers? These professions don’t lend themselves to telecommuting. (I don’t worry as much about the psychologists – the hourly wage I’ve paid for them indicates that they probably get paid more than the rest of the folks on the list. Of course, they probably get the most suicidal phone calls, too, but you can’t have everything.)
Authors and artists, of course, are the exceptions about the outsourcing thing – after all, J.K. Rowling didn’t have to leave Scotland for all of us to read Harry Potter. But still, we get to express what’s inside us. During the years of my life that I did administrative work, I spent a majority of my time purposely not expressing what I was thinking. No one wants to hear that the secretary thinks your business proposal has some holes in it, or that she’s pretty sure the consultant you just handed thousands of dollars to is playing you for a sucker. Not even if she’s right. (Especially not if she’s right.)
I could spend a lot of time discussing why these jobs make people happy, but there’s another point to be made here that isn’t dealt with in Mr. Denning’s article: Why are these jobs paid so little?
Is it because we as Americans think it’s wrong to enjoy your job? (Most artists mean it when they say they’d do it for free – and they usually end up doing just that. You’ll never find a Director of Marketing doing that, now will you?) Or do we devalue them because we think they’re easy? (Ah, the irony – we talk about how easy it is to teach right before we discuss all the teachers we had who did it badly.) Maybe we are sticking to our guns – people should be clergy because they want to help people, not because they’re going to make a lot of money. (You can definitely make a case for it.  By the same token, though, it would be awfully nice if people became doctors just because they wanted to heal the sick, wouldn’t it? It would clear up that whole kickbacks-from-the-pharmaceutical-industry problem.)
In these difficult economic times, it will be interesting to see if the pendulum shifts at all about the worth we give different occupations. Maybe we will start to value those ten happiest jobs. Personally, I would love to make society change its mind overnight and decide to pay teachers, clergy, physical therapists, artists and firefighters what they’re worth. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary skills of mass persuasion.
If I did, let’s face it – I’d quit writing and go work in the Sales & Marketing Department, where the real money is.
Kimberly is kidding about that, she’s probably never going to quit writing. But all Sales and Marketing Departments are welcome to come work for her. If working for peanuts makes a person happy, marketing books for someone who can’t afford to pay you has to make you ecstatic.
