by Heather Stone, President,
myjobsearch.com
Functional Fit
If you are like the majority of employees today, the job you are in is not a good "fit" for you. According to Dr. Herbert Greenberg, president of the Marketing Survey and Research Corporation, "Eighty of the work force in the U.S. is misemployed. People often stumble into jobs because of a newspaper advertisement, a previous summer job, because a friend tells them it's in a lucrative field, or some other accident. Few overcome their beginning."
Have you ever had thoughts like these:
- "I just can't seem to get going."
- "It sure is hard to get up in the morning."
- "Why can't I concentrate on my job?"
- "This job pays well, so why can't I be happy with it?"
Your sense of dread, your lack of energy, and your overall stress level just might be coming from your job! Imagine a job where you use your favorite skills and abilities daily. Picture a work environment where you are rewarded for doing what you enjoy. Visualize a career where your compensation motivated you, making you feel more successful and more valued. Envision being excited by what you do for a living and feeling like your career is full of possibilities. That is how it feels when your work suits you.
Part of finding a job that suits you is analyzing the specifics of the job in minute detail. If you are currently working in a job you don't like, you may be tempted to skip this analysis. After all, it probably seems like a new job--any new job--would have to be better than your current position. But think twice before you accept an offer just to get out. If you go toward something you'll like, not just away from something you don't like, you'll have better long-term career success. Unfortunately, most of us have had the experience of taking a great new job, only to find a couple months down the road that our new employer has as many warts on his nose as our previous employer--and expects just as many late night hours!
Here's one way to take the rosy glow off that new job offer, and assess the reality of whether you will enjoy the work environment, the tasks you'll do, and the people you'll do them with: analyze a job for "FIT" by assessing Function, Industry, and Track. This column helps you assess Functional Fit. Later columns will help you match your job to your interests in the areas of Industry and Track.
Functional Fit
Your job function is the categories of tasks you actually do on a day-to-day basis. Every job contains several functions. The key to getting function right is to make sure that the primary function you enjoy is the primary function you're being rewarded for in the job. When I was a technical writer, my job functions were:
- Interviewing engineers about the product
- Organizing ideas into an outline
- Writing documents
- Editing documents
Four very different functions, all part of the same job. The function I enjoyed the most was interviewing the engineers. I was careful and thorough in my interviews, and most of the engineers liked me and respected my skill. But I was always scrambling to meet my page count deadlines. The problem was that my boss rewarded and rated me based on the number and the quality of the pages I turned out, not based on my stellar interpersonal skills in interviewing. My boss wanted interviewing engineers to take 10% of my time and I wanted it to take 90% of my time. It was a constant battle to both get my job done and enjoy it. I eventually moved into a product management job where the primary job function my boss cared about was interacting with and building rapport with an engineering team. I was much happier, and so was my boss.
Here are three ways to tell if your job is a functional match for you:
- Do you consistently find yourself staying late to finish an assigned task that you just somehow couldn't get to during the regular work day? It might be because you found other work-related, but less important, tasks you enjoy more. No matter what the boss says, most of us are going to do the parts of the job we like the most during regular working hours, and save the parts we don't enjoy for when we're on deadline.
- When people ask what you do, do you describe your job using a different job title than your actual one? I once had an employee who was a trainer, and like all our trainers, he participated in curriculum development with about 5% of his time. When people asked him what he did for a living, he often replied "training and product development." He preferred curriculum design to training.
- Does your boss often say things to you like:
- Are you focused on your work?
- You seem distracted.
- You should spend less time talking to others in the office.
- Let's prioritize your tasks because I'm not sure you're working on the right thing.
When the boss wants to chain you to your desk, you may have a poor functional fit. When special projects you get assigned are way more fun than your regular job, you may have a poor functional fit. When the tasks you don't like doing are the tasks that your colleagues in the same job love to do, you may have a poor functional fit.
So, no matter how dissatisfied you are with your current job, take a minute to assess the fit in your next one before you say yes.
And one final word of caution: Most of us can do many more tasks than we actually enjoy doing. I can clean the toilets in my kid's bathroom quite well, for example. Functional fit is not about what you CAN do; it's about what you WANT to do. Reward yourself with a job you love, not just a job you can do. Not only will you do better work if you are doing something you like, but you will be able to expend your energy on doing your job rather than on forcing yourself to go to work everyday.
Written by Heather Stone, President of
myjobsearch.com, the jobseekers supersite! Heather is president of
myjobsearch.com, the company behind the jobseeker's supersite of the same name. She frequently consults with employers on hiring practices and with jobseekers on the Internet job search process. She has spoken at computer and employment industry conferences, and she was recently recognized by Utah Business Magazine for owning one of the "Top 25 Woman Owned Businesses" in the state of Utah. She is a member of Young Entrepreneur's Organization (YEO), an international organization for company owners under the age of 40.
