Are you in the right job? We spend so much of our life working that this is a question people ask themselves a lot. But what actually helps match workers to the right jobs for them. Research provides more useful answers than hackneyed encouragement to think about where our passions lie.
First, the right manager helps. We know managers affect firm performance (just ask Spurs), but a new study uses data from one large company over 10 years to examine the impact of “good” managers moving to lead a team. The impact is big and lasting, driven by good managers triggering more reallocation of workers across the firm/team.
Better matching of workers to jobs they are suited to boosts performance and endures: seven years on, these workers earn 30% more. It turns out we need to choose our managers, not just our parents, carefully.
What else helps match us to jobs we’re good at? Self-awareness. Recent research measured the communication/numeracy skills of jobseekers in South Africa, and what they believed their skill levels to be.
Of course, we overestimate our own abilities, but we’re also very bad at assessing our own strengths (i.e. knowing what we’re relatively good at compared with others). This matters because we apply for jobs requiring skills we think we’re relatively strong on.
The authors show that if jobseekers are told about their actual strengths, it changes what jobs they apply for, boosting wages (by 25%) and job satisfaction. Now this is interesting, but note the research is focused on younger workers – I’m less sure sudden self-awareness will benefit the middle-aged among us. It’s a bit late for me to find out I should have joined an actual circus, rather than working on the high-wire act that is British economic policy.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
