Are you job hunting because you’re no longer happy in your current role? Maybe the solution lies in ‘job crafting’; reshaping your job in such a way that it makes you happy again. Journalist Nina Siegal tried it, with positive results.
Luc Dorenbosch is a researcher at an Amsterdam-based company in the Netherlands that helps people rethink their work in new and creative ways. He says people quite often become disenchanted with their jobs when actually it’s just a few small things that are making them unhappy. “Often, people are satisfied with 80 percent of a job, but it’s the ‘bothersome’ 20 percent of the job that is making them want to leave,” Dorenbosch says.
“They might also find out that only a small part of what they do is really bothering them – maybe it was just ten percent and they didn’t mind that, but then it starts to be 20 or 30 percent, which becomes a problem.” Yet people often decide to leave a job that’s basically a good fit. “It leads to choices that are not necessarily good ones,” Dorenbosch says. “In many cases it would be better to experiment with your current job and see if you can make it more satisfying.”
- You can read about job crafting in Issue 18.
Text Nina Siegal Illustrations Geraldine Sy
