Knowing your values will help you gain a clearer understanding of what matters to you most in life. A value is a conviction and a priority that are important to you and that guide your behavior. When making choices and pursuing options that will make you happy, such as career options, values can act as your compass.
10 Career Values – Why we work, what motivate us
Why are career values important?
Career values are crucial because they can help establish the parameters for your personal fulfillment and professional success. You can be intentional in your career search and use your values to shape your future by recognizing your own values and what matters most to you. Understanding your preferences and locating a position that fully meets your needs requires you to take this crucial step. You can more easily assess whether a particular role is a good fit for you and picture yourself succeeding in such a position if you keep your values in mind.
Working in positions that don’t align with their career values can make it difficult for professionals to channel their energy toward cultivating success. These unmet needs and overarching principles can then become barriers to productivity. Finding a job that aligns with your values and meets your needs is crucial because it will enable you to concentrate all of your energy on performing your tasks well, encouraging innovation, and developing your skills. Furthermore, it’s likely that you’ll be able to foster fulfillment on both a professional and personal level if you can find a job that fits well with your career values.
What are career values?
Career values are ethical standards that guide your professional decisions. These values typically describe the environmental and role-dependent elements that you believe are most crucial for promoting success, job satisfaction, and career advancement. Each professional typically has their own preferences in terms of work style and environment, so career values vary from person to person. For instance, you might value creativity, flexibility, and autonomy if you prefer to work in a collaborative setting with flexible hours. In contrast, another professional might value having the opportunity to work in a high-level, influential position with a variety of challenges and opportunities.
Regardless of their personal preferences, the majority of professionals try to match their values with their career choice. Finding and keeping a job that adheres to all of your career values can be difficult, but being aware of your needs can greatly improve your professional success. These principles can help you find a position where you can produce excellent work, advance professionally, support the lifestyle you desire, and accomplish other pertinent objectives you have set for yourself. In light of this, acknowledging your overall goals, desires, and purpose can be achieved by determining your career values.
Types of career values
When identifying your own, there are many different types of career values to take into account. Intrinsic, extrinsic, and lifestyle values are the three main categories of career values. Here is a description of each of those three categories and the range of values that each one represents:
Intrinsic
Intrinsic career values are those elements that give your role a personal meaning. These values are typically distinct from outside rewards, such as money or recognition, which emphasize the results of your work. Instead, intrinsic values are those things that have worth on their own, usually because they fit your needs and work style preferences. Here are a few fundamental principles that are described in terms of how they might apply to your career:
Extrinsic
Career values that come from outside sources are the compensation you receive for working as a professional. These values could be different from your internal values or ones that aid in meaning-making. With this, you can find a role that has value outside of its intrinsic meaning or value. Extrinsic values may be more motivating for some professionals than intrinsic ones because of their apparent tangibility and potential for increased value through producing high-quality work. Several extrinsic values are described below along with examples of how they might apply to your career:
Lifestyle
Values in your lifestyle career are those that improve your quality of life outside of work. While intrinsic and extrinsic values may affect your quality of life, lifestyle values can define your ability to find fulfillment outside of your professional role and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Depending on their personal preferences, some professionals may view lifestyle career values as extremely important, while others may conceptualize these values as less significant. Following are a few lifestyle values and how they might apply to your career, explained:
How to identify your career values
Depending on your specific professional experiences, you can choose from a variety of methods to determine your career values. You can follow this method to determine your values in six steps:
1. Reflect on your past career experiences
By considering your prior professional experiences, you should start the process of identifying your career values. It can be beneficial to reflect on the career values you valued in your previous roles and, in comparison, those elements that over time evolved into professional roadblocks. You can gain a better understanding of your requirements for a work environment, a work style, and a lifestyle by reflecting on the types of experiences you’ve had and how they’ve shaped your professional success and satisfaction. Consider times when you felt fulfilled, for instance, and consider what circumstances led to that fulfillment.
2. Analyze your experiences
Once you’ve compiled a list of pertinent past experiences through reflection, attempt to dissect them and determine the values that shaped them. For instance, perhaps you can think of a time when you exceeded expectations in a previous position but were not recognized for it by the management or other team members. You may come to the conclusion that recognition is a crucial career value to you if this experience felt difficult. In contrast, you may come to the conclusion that you value creativity in your career if you genuinely enjoyed a previous position that provided you with a variety of opportunities to practice problem-solving and innovation.
3. Perform a self-assessment
You can conduct a self-evaluation using a list of potential values after considering the general presence of professional values in your career through reflection and analysis of your experience. You might find it useful to use a list like the one above and highlight the values that really stand out to you. You might choose to circle values that bring to mind the reflections you made or other values you want to emphasize moving forward but haven’t yet encountered in your career. During your self-evaluation, you are free to select as many values as you like.
4. Prioritize five to 10 values from your assessment
After completing your self-evaluation and selecting different values from the list, you can focus your choices by choosing the top five to ten values for you. Your ability to concentrate on the elements that will affect your professional satisfaction, success, and overall lifestyle contentment moving forward can be improved by condensing your list of career values. You can then order the values that result from your consolidation in this manner.
5. Define those values personally
You should try to define those values in terms of your own needs and preferences after consolidating your values and prioritizing five to ten of them. This is a crucial step that can assist you in comprehending how such values specifically operate within the day-to-day performance of your role and responsibilities. As you go through this process, you might discover how one value you want to emphasize relates to another, which can help you gain a better understanding of the kind of workplace success requires.
For example, you might view having enough money to support your family as an extrinsic value related to your need for a flexible work environment that supports your lifestyle. Knowing where these values intersect can help you prioritize and rank them appropriately.
6. Rank your values by importance
Try ranking your values by importance in descending order after you’ve defined them through a personal lens. To help you understand their significance in your career search, place the most important values at the top of your list and the least important values at the bottom. This procedure can assist you in discussing the career values you’ve chosen based on your own assessment and recognizing which of those values may not be negotiable.
This can guide your overall career search. For instance, if your list of values places benevolence high and recognition low, you might want to deliberately look for careers that allow you to help people in need while also occasionally receiving recognition. Comparatively, ranking them in reverse may influence how you approach your job search.
FAQ
What are some values for a career?
People who love their jobs do so for intangible reasons called intrinsic career values. Achievement, commitment, contribution, equality, sincerity, independence, respect, responsibility, power, and status are some examples of common intrinsic values.
What is the most important career value?
Many things can contribute to job satisfaction. An opportunity to use one’s skills and abilities and job security were ranked as the top two factors in a 2012 study on employee job satisfaction and engagement by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
What are the top 3 values at work?
- A Strong Work Ethic.
- Dependability and Responsibility.
- Possessing a Positive Attitude.
- Adaptability.
- Honesty and Integrity.
- Self-Motivated.
- Motivated to Grow and Learn.
- Strong Self-Confidence.
How do I find my career value?
Examining a list of examples and ranking how important you find each of the examples to be as a career goal Rate the list on a scale of one to ten. Then, look over some of the most highly regarded values and select six to ten that should be given the most weight when evaluating careers and other options.
