If you hate your job you’re not alone. Seventy percent of Americans actively dislike their job or are not excited about what they are doing with their lives. That is pretty sad. Many solutions today focus on fixing the job with such things as access to catered meals, a ping pong table or free massages.
Source: CNBC/Gallup: Just 30 percent of employees are engaged and inspired at work, according to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace Report, which surveyed more than 150,000 full- and part-time workers during 2012. A little more than half of workers (52 percent) have a perpetual case of the Mondays—they’re present, but not particularly excited about their job. The remaining 18 percent are actively disengaged, roaming the halls spreading discontent.
Google is often cited as the icon for the happy work environment. 84 percent of the Google workforce has a high level of job satisfaction, one of the highest percentages in the Fortune 500. It helps that the average salary at Google is $107,000 per year. But money, free gourmet food, kindergartens and gyms and free time to work on personal projects is not the only story at Google. Google invests lots of effort to make sure that they hire right people in the first place.
Unless you already work for Google their work place solution is not available to you. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have good options available. You have to change what you do at the beginning, not after you have a degree and begin to look for a job. The forty five year old with a college education who ends up with a degree and a job they (you) hate, most often takes the traditional path to education.
That traditional path begins with the way education decisions are made in our society today. The example here does not describe 100% of the cases but it is true for the majority. And it is likely it will be true for you unless you do something about it before enrolling in a degree program. The first education decision is typically the selection of a college/university to attend. The assumption is: “If I enroll in the most selective university possible I will have the best chance for career success”. This critical assumption is wrong. When it comes to your pay, what you study in college is more important than where you go to school.
Once enrolled in the university of choice, enrolled students try to figure out what to study – a sequence I call Major – Major – Major in my book “Your Future is Calling.” And it is here where the “I Hate My Job” trap begins to snap shut. Desperate and running out of student loans, the typical student will feel an urge to just get a degree and then look for a job. The last question being asked is whether the degree/job fits what I call “who they are”. The result is the forty five year old with a big mortgage, auto loans, kids in school, family obligations and a decreasing number of options to deal with the sad fact that they hate the job they ended up taking.
It’s no wonder so many hate their jobs. Often the job taken is the desperation decision at the end of a string of choices that started at the wrong point in the first place. To avoid this sad state of affairs you need to reverse the sequence.
Rather than beginning with the decision to attend a specific college or university, a better path is to begin with understanding “who you are” in the first place. From there, the best sequence is to select a career based on the match between “who you are” and future career prospects. The selection of a major to prepare you for the career that fits “who you are” is next. Last comes the choice of the university with the best major – tuition cost combination.
In the end, your goal is to immensely improve the odds that as a forty-five year old your state of mind is not “I hate my job”. You want to be able to say what the vast majority of employees at Google say, namely “I love my job”. There are actually people in the world who say that everyday. Your main goal should be to become one of them.
Oh, by the way, there’s an outcome at least tied for worst with “I hate my job”. It’s having huge student debt, a worthless degree and no job at all. My advice is to avoid this outcome at all costs. Work conditions at Google cannot help you here. Only you, and the decisions you make today, can produce the better outcome. GO FOR IT!
