Unhappy at Work? Try This Gig.

The top-rated happiest job is......(spoiler alert: it's shocking).

Oct 11, 2021

∙ Paid

This Week: We are exploring the jobs that make people the happiest.

Today, we’ll chat about why some jobs make people happier than others. On Friday, I’ll share a list of available jobs with a high rating of employee happiness.

Know someone who’d get a kick out this newsletter? Share! Share! Share. Please? It would mean a whole lot to a hard-working busy bee like me.

Here’s one thing they don’t teach you in school:

Your job can directly impact your happiness.

They teach you semi use-full skills that, along with many internships and a carefully packaged resume, can hopefully get you a job.

But they don’t teach you that some jobs will completely make your quality of life pretty harsh.

My first three jobs after college were so awful that it was impossible to be positive about other areas of my life.

When you have a boss who yells at you for everything, including laughing at work (that seriously happened), it bleeds into how you find yourself acting and feeling when you’re not sitting in your cubicle.

Over 60 percent of the population are unhappy in their work.

Let’s talk about what makes people happy at work.

So what makes a job a happy one?

According to Vanessa Van Edwards, the founder of the Science for People, there are four key elements that make a job a “happy” one.

Vanessa says that list includes:

Prosocial: Interacting with people and helping them in some way
Creative: Being able to see a vision and make it happen
Teaching: Jobs that allow others to learn from your experiences or knowledge
Protecting: Jobs that help others who are in danger or in bad health

The more I thought about Vanessa’s list, the more I realized that even for a person to have a decently happy job, they need at least one of these things.

The job I loved the most, before I got laid-off and became a full-time entrepreneur, had 2/4 of these things (prosocial and creative).

I’d add income, support from the company/management, growth, environment and benefits to that list.

What would you add? Let us know below.

What’s the happiest job out there?

Does your job make your happy?

According to a giant study of over 30,000 people, the happiest employees were…….

Construction and facility service workers.

What? Did you think the answer was going to be entrepreneur or NFT trader?

Not even close!

So why being a construction worker one of the happiest gigs?

Jay Walter, general manager of JWH Group, an Australian home-building company, summed it up:

“This is an industry that has many walks of life with people working in an office to people out on site,” he says. “One thing that unites everybody at the end of the day is kicking back for a little bit with a few beers and talking stuff out–the good and the bad. If people have an issue, they will come see a manager during office hours, but sometimes the best environment is when people can relax a bit and just have a drink alongside a manager.”

FYI: I do think there’s a lot of factors that go into what can make you happy vs. unhappy at a job. It’s totally not one size fits all.

Which is why it’s first super important to know yourself, understand your boundaries and your personal values, and then match that to a career that’s going to align with those things.

According to Zippia, here are the jobs that people ranked the highest in the “happy” category based on things like work environment, income, benefits, and more. (Full-list available here).

Human resource managers. They’re in high demand in almost every industry. And it depends on where you live, but the average salary nationwide is $115,000.

Engineers. According to a few studies, engineers are among the happiest people in the world. The average salary of $90,000 doesn’t hurt either.

Physical therapists. It’s another job that’s in high demand. They make around $90,000 a year. And doing something that helps heal people is very rewarding.

Construction managers. They rank high in overall happiness, so maybe spending all that time outside helps. They make an average of $95,000 a year.

Finance managers. It’s a stressful job, but they still report high levels of positivity. And they have the highest salary on the list, $130,000 a year.