For anyone fresh out of school or university, they feel they can make a huge impact on whatever job they get. They hope to make an impact within a couple of weeks or a month. After a few months, they start to feel that their job is not living up to expectations and consider quitting. For many the problem is job fulfilment and acquiring that feeling, they make a difference within the team or company.

What is fulfilment?

Fulfilment is a feeling of happiness, meaningfulness, self-worth, and satisfaction of work. Many of us have experienced that feeling of satisfaction when we donate to charity, help a charity through an event, help people or contribute to the wellbeing of others. For example, you may have helped someone with their shopping due to him or her isolating or given up your place in a queue because that person was in a hurry. The feeling you get is that you feel you have made a huge difference to someone or an organisation; you start to feel good and have a sense of purpose. That feeling of satisfaction and purpose is important in the workplace. For many, we often change jobs to seek an environment where we feel we have a purpose and feel that we can make a difference. This is one reason why many low paid jobs have high turnover due to job fulfilment.

Why is career fulfilment a problem?

Current understanding of workplace happiness

Many companies do an annual employee survey on how they feel about working for their company. Most often an employee will get the question of “Are you happy working at ….?”. This question does not show whether they are happy with their position or job. Happiness is judged at that moment in time. Some employees may feel unhappy because they are having a bad day or for some people, they may feel happy because they just had some success. Often these surveys are designed to improve job retention and highlight areas of improvement as a whole. Yet some companies may find most employees say they are happy but yet a lot of people leave. The surveys are not designed to find out how the employees feel about the work they produce and whether they feel valued and make a difference through their work.

Young Generation Retention

Companies often find job retention in younger generations difficult. To make the job appeal to a younger generation they may advertise cool workspaces/break out areas with a ping-pong table. Yet with their fancy ping-pong tables, the young employee decides to leave. For many finishing education they leave with a sense of purpose that they can make a huge impact on the company and change the world. If they feel their job does not match their purpose they often search for a new job. Many companies focus on work output and hitting monthly/annual targets. While this is good at the company level, many young employees do not feel important or have a purpose at work apart from hitting targets. For many young employees, they need more interaction and 1-2-1 mentorship as well as responsibility to have that feeling of importance and job fulfilment.

Just Doing what is required of you

During the process of getting a job for many of us, we see a job specification and we mentally tick what we can do against that job specification. Once the employer hires you, you eventually stick to a routine of what is expected from you and do your hours. Over time your job will start to become boring and be too much of a routine. For many of us, we accept that doing what is required and the hours is enough. For some, they decide to seek another job. To seek fulfilment you need to find a purpose or objective that you wish to achieve short term or long term. For many, we wait for our team manager to tell us what to do to improve or to contribute to the team. Often or not what they tell you may not match what you think is important or match your purpose. Whether it is to gain a better understanding of what a system does, help improve colleagues understanding or help improve a customer journey by being more hands-on with a customer.

How to find your career fulfilment?

Many of us seek career fulfilment, here are 3 ways to find fulfilment:

Find your purpose

To find the fulfilment you will need to identify your purpose so you can strive towards it. You can ask a few questions like:

Am I happy? How does my career make me feel?

Who am I proving myself to?

What do I want to happen?

Challenge yourself

It’s normal to remain safe and comfortable in your routine however by staying in that space, you will not be able to push yourself and grow. Take up a new project or learn new skills that will challenge and make you work hard to succeed.

Find a mentor

Sometimes to develop even further you will need to learn from the best to be the best. Having good mentors around you to learn from can help you improve and develop your skills. Mentors also can give you crucial career advice and may open doors for you.

Summary

Many of us seek fulfilment within our career, however, to gain that sense of fulfilment within our jobs and careers we are responsible for the direction we want to take. By identifying our purpose and what we want to achieve short or long term we can strive towards that goal and find fulfilment.

Even though we solely have the responsibility to find fulfilment, employers also have the responsibility to ensure their employees find job fulfilment to improve job retention. Most individuals will need to feel that what they are doing contributes to the team or company’s cause and purpose rather than just hitting targets. By giving employees the feeling that their work is contributing to the success of colleagues around them and the company, they will feel valued and most likely stay.

As human beings, we always seek the value of importance, attention, and purpose from childhood to adulthood. By gaining that sense of fulfilment we can have a happier work-life that by the end of the day we feel we have contributed to a cause or to make a world a better place.