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Defining Your Work Values

Besides using one’s technical knowledge and experience on the job, there are certain factors that can increase or decrease our job satisfaction. For example, one’s co-workers can make a tedious or stressful job more bearable, or being able to help others could be so important that pay doesn’t matter. These types of "work values" help create a sense of purpose: Why am I here? Why do I work (besides income)? What keeps me going? These additional sources of satisfaction can be the hardest for the average job seeker to identify, but for many these work values may be the most important job characteristics.

An awareness of these work values will make job hunting and career development easier. This can provide the interviewee with possible questions to ask the prospective employer and can define the direction of one’s job investigation.

The following work values are not a definitive list; there may be other values that you may think are important as well. Add those into your priority exercise as well.

Help Society: Do something to contribute to the betterment of the world I live in.

Help Others: Be involved in helping other people in a direct way, either individually or in small groups.

Public Contact: Have a lot of day-to-day contact with people.

Work with Others: Have close working relationships with a group; work as a team toward common goals.

Affiliation: Be recognized as a member of a particular organization.

Friendships: Have co-workers provide compensating social interaction or develop close personal relationships with people as a result of my work activities.

Competition: Engage in activities which pit my abilities against others where there are clear win-and-lose outcomes.

Make Decisions: Have the power to decide courses of action, policies, etc.

Work under Pressure: Work in situations where time pressure is prevalent and/or the quality of my work is judged critically by supervisors, customers, or others.

Power and Authority: Control the work activities or (partially) the destinies of other people.

Influence People: Be in a position to change attitudes or opinions of other people.

Work Alone: Do projects by myself, without any significant amount of contact with others.

Knowledge: Engage myself in the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and understanding.

Intellectual Status: Be regarded as a person of high intellectual prowess or as one who is an acknowledged "expert" in a given field.

Artistic Creativity: Engage in creative work in any of several art forms.

Creativity (general): Create new ideas, programs, organizational structures, or anything else not following a format previously developed by others.

Aesthetics: Be involved in studying or appreciating the beauty of things, ideas, etc.

Supervisor: Have a job in which I am directly responsible for the work done by others.

Change and Variety: Have work responsibilities which frequently change in their content and setting.

Precision Work: Work in situations where there is very little tolerance for error.

Stability: Have a work routine and job duties that are largely predictable and not likely to change over a long period of time.

Security: Be assured of keeping my job and receiving a reasonable financial award.

Fast Pace: Work in circumstances where work must be done rapidly.

Recognition: Be recognized for the quality of my work in some visible or public way.

Excitement: Experience a high degree of (or frequent) excitement in the course of my work.

Adventure: Have work duties that involve frequent risk-taking.

Profit, gain: Have a strong likelihood of accumulating large amounts of money or other material gain.

Independence: Be able to determine the nature of my work without significant direction from others; not have to do what others tell me to.

Moral Fulfillment: Feel that my work is contributing significantly to a set of moral standards which I feel is very important.

Location: Find a place to live (town, geographical area) which is conducive to my life-style and affords me the opportunity to do the things I enjoy most.

Community: Live in a town or city where I can get involved in community affairs.

Time Freedom: Have work responsibilities which I can work at according to my own time schedule; no specific working hours required.

Physical Challenge: Have a job that makes physical demands which I would find rewarding.

Task Completion: Have work duties that would result in a observable product or that can be taken to completion on a daily or weekly basis.

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