{"id":633,"date":"2006-10-12T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-12T11:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=633"},"modified":"2006-10-12T11:38:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-12T11:38:00","slug":"job-satisfaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2006\/10\/12\/job-satisfaction\/","title":{"rendered":"Job satisfaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to a seminar yesterday on building a career management strategy in the public service. I don’t think it was the intention of the organizers, but by the time I left I had a huge sense of satisfaction both with my current job, and with my future job prospects. (Of course, it helps that I walked out of that seminar and happened to pick up my language test results<\/a>, lifting a 1000 lbs elephant off my shoulders.)<\/p>\n

I was planning to link to some survey results, but apparently I copied down the URL wrong and no amount of searching through the Treasury Board Web site has turned it up. You’ll have to trust my wonky memory on the details, I guess.<\/p>\n

The gist of it was that they came up with a number of measures that indicate job satisfaction, including having challenging and interesting work, having work-life balance, having opportunities for advancement, and of course, recognition and compensation. I was really surprised to see that in the sample of public servants they surveyed, satisfaction across these factors topped out at around 50 per cent.<\/p>\n

It made me realize how very lucky I am to be doing a job that I truly enjoy for all of those reasons. My work is challenging and interesting, if not a little bit overly bureaucratic at times, ad I love the people I work with. I leave the office almost every day at 3:30 and almost never take work home with me. I’ve been promoted twice within the past five years, including two full years off for maternity leave. And quite honestly, I make more money that I ever imagined I would. We’re not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but when I was in my twenties I could never really envision having enough money to actually own a house – so I’ve come a long way!<\/p>\n

It’s almost funny how serendipitous the whole thing has been. I’m not particularly ambitious, and I seem to have arrived here by whimsy as much as by design. Sure, I’ve worked hard and I think I’ve done a good job proving myself and my capabilities to my employers, but I still shake my head in amazement to look back and see that not only do I have a job, but I have a career – and one I love at that. How lucky am I?<\/p>\n

I don’t imagine I’ll ever leave the public service. Heck, I’ve been with this department for 17 years – hard to imagine ever leaving here, let alone starting over again in the private sector. As of this year, I’ll be closer to my retirement (age 55) than I am to the day I started my career here at the tender age of 20. They aren’t kidding when they call them the ‘golden handcuffs’.<\/p>\n

The great irony, of course, is that all I ever wanted to be was a mom. Even when I was a teenager, my career aspirations were something vague like, “I’d like to be a journalist, or in PR, or maybe sales. But mostly, I just want to be a mom.” And in the coming years, it’s only going to get harder to balance the raising of three little kids with this daytime life of mine.<\/p>\n

But I’m glad to have had a little bit of a perspective check, to realize that everyone is not as lucky as me to be in a job they love, with people who treat them well, getting paid for it all to boot.<\/p>\n

Even on a grey, rainy day, there are lots of reasons to be grateful. I’m a lucky girl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went to a seminar yesterday on building a career management strategy in the public service. I don’t think it was the intention of the organizers, but by the time I left I had a huge sense of satisfaction both with my current job, and with my future job prospects. (Of course, it helps that … Continue reading “Job satisfaction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-is-all-about-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}