Is Job Satisfaction More Important than How much You Earn?

The chances are you will spend most of your adult life working and so it helps to be doing a job that leaves you with a sense of fulfilment. Everyone has to work in order to pay their own way – to pay the mortgage or rent; to buy essentials such as food; to enjoy life's little luxuries, including holidays and fancy new electronic gadgets. Some jobs obviously pay better than others, but to get a high-paying job you usually have to possess specific qualifications and have a certain amount of experience. In an ideal world, you would have a job that gives you satisfaction and also pays well.

You don't always have that option, though, when you perhaps don't have any training or experience, having left school early and finding that there aren't as many jobs around as you thought. It can be particularly difficult in a challenging economic climate when there is a great deal of competition for jobs. You can find yourself applying for jobs which come with very little status and even less pay, just so that you will be able to pay the bills. The concept of job satisfaction doesn't even enter your mind when you're desperate for cash and there are only so many suitable jobs available.

Job satisfaction is important when you think about the fact you will most probably be doing the same job for a long time to come. You certainly don't want to be stuck in a dead-end job with very little chance of progression, working alongside people you despise and living in constant fear that you may lose your job. However, to find a job and develop a satisfying career, you have to plan what you want to do early on. It is only by deciding on a particular career path when you're younger that you are able to make the right decisions to enable you to achieve success.

If you have some idea what you would like to accomplish in your career, other than earning lots of money, you will be able to stay focused on your studies, picking appropriate courses and getting good grades, and try to acquire some experience in your chosen profession, which will help later on. If you give no thought to what you want to do when you're older, it will be much harder to establish yourself in a career and to find a job that is likely to be fulfilling.

Quite often, a fulfilling career is also one that you are in a position to earn decent money doing, since you may require specialist skills that companies are willing to pay for. Plus, if you enjoy what you're doing you will be prepared to go the extra mile to achieve success, which means you are more likely to be rewarded with promotion and, thus, a higher salary. It is therefore clear that you shouldn't focus solely on how much you could earn from doing a particular job, when building a fulfilling career could actually help you obtain the financial rewards you feel you deserve.