Identifying Your Work Values

[MoU_Team]

Clarifying Your Work Values Leads to Job Satisfaction

What Are Work Values

Throughout your life you acquired a set of values — beliefs and ideas that are important to you. For example you may believe that one should always be honest or that one must always be a loyal friend. You live your life according to this set of values. In order to have a happy, successful and fulfilling life, you must act upon your values, both in your personal life and at work. Taking your values into account when you choose a career could be the most important factor that determines whether you will or won't be satisfied with that aspect of your life.

Clarifying your work values, that subset of values that relate to your career, is essential. Your work values are both intrinsic, relating to the actual tasks involved in practicing a particular occupation, and extrinsic, relating to the by-products of an occupation. An intrinsic value might be helping others, while an example of an extrinsic value is earning a lot of money.

How to Identify Work Values
Career development professionals, including career counselors and career development facilitators, use work value inventories to measure how important various work values are to you. Generally, a work value inventory is simply a list of values that you are asked to rate. For example, the instructions may tell you to rate each value on a scale of one to 10, giving a one to those values that are most important to you and a 10 to those that are least important. Alternatively, you may be asked to list a series of work values in order of importance.

The results of a work value inventory are used to identify appropriate career choices, by matching an individual's work values with characteristics of occupations. A work value inventory is best used in conjunction with other self assessment instruments that help identify one's personality, interests and skills.

Examples and Definitions of Work Values
Here are examples of items that could appear on a work value inventory, along with a definition of each one. When reading this list, think about how important each value is to you.

* Autonomy: receiving no or little supervision

* Helping Others: providing assistance to individuals or groups

* Prestige: having high standing

* Job Security: a high probability that one will remain employed

* Collaboration: working with others

* Helping Society: contributing to the betterment of the world

* Recognition: receiving attention for your work

* Compensation: receiving adequate pay

* Achievement: doing work that yields results

* Utilizing Your Skills and Background: using your education and work experience to do your job

* Leadership: supervising/managing others

* Creativity: using your own ideas

* Variety: doing different activities

* Challenge: performing tasks that are difficult

* Leisure: having adequate time away from work

* Recognition: receiving credit for achievements

* Artistic Expression: expressing one's artistic talents

* Influence: having the ability to affect people's opinions and ideas

More About Work Values and Self Assessment

* What is Self Assessment?
* Career Decisions: Self Assessment
* Top 10 Books About Career Choice

Career Choice for Beginners

* How to Make a Career Choice
* 10 Career Planning Myths
* Free Career Planning Course

Changing Careers

* Six Reasons to Make a Career Change
* Quiz: Should You Make a Career Change?
* Transferable Skills

[Highered11]

I think that these values are often overlooked and not even considered by people, but they can hold to be very important. In all honesty, I think that when people have been at the same company for a long time these because a part of routine. However, these will become important if you decide to look for a new job.

Frankly, you need to be able to identify these and clearly articulate them through your cover letter, resume and interviews. Why? The people you work with now will have inherently learned these values over your tenure there, and therefore, there is no need for you to clearly define these. But once you switch into a different field or company, those values could be expressed differently. You can use a resume service to articulate these values for the industry/field you are wanting to enter.

This may sound like it requires a lot of work to define these, but really it just takes some thinking about what you have stood for, and the practices you have established to align your actions and results with those values.

Good luck!