Career Satisfaction

Career satisfaction is an important variable in research on career development and other areas of inquiry dealing with occupations, work dynamics, and individual adjustment. Although career satisfaction is seldom the primary topic of research investigations, it is often studied as an important criterion variable in relation to many different personal and organizational factors. It should be emphasized that the term career refers to all of the work-related activities a person engages in and all of the work-related experiences a person has over the course of a lifetime. Defined this way, career applies to everyone who works, not just individuals in a profession or higher-level occupations. On the other hand, most empirical studies in this area have focused on professional occupations in which a career represents a sequence of related jobs over time, with an emphasis on advancement, progression, and cumulative experience.

When researchers ask people to look back over their lives and indicate how satisfied they are with their careers, several assumptions are usually made. First, a career is a concept that has meaning for people as a discrete phenomenon in its own right, as a specific domain of experience. Most people do not have to stop and think about each job they have had and how satisfied they were with each one to tell you how satisfied they are with their careers. They think about their careers as a whole. A second assumption is that careers change over time, and satisfaction depends on advancement. A person who starts out in a higher-level job and ends up in a midlevel job will almost always be less career satisfied than someone who starts out in a low-level job and ends up in a midlevel job. Thus, most scales that are used to measure career satisfaction have one or more items dealing with the progress a person has made over time in key areas such as income and job responsibility and in the development of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Third, as in most areas of satisfaction, the assessment of career satisfaction usually involves consideration of current versus desired or expected level of experience. For example, a career satisfaction item might ask: How satisfied are you with the progress you have made (in your career) toward achieving your goals for earnings? The lower the discrepancy between the current level versus the desired or expected level, the greater the satisfaction. If this model were valid, one possible strategy for achieving career satisfaction would be to keep expectations low. But such a strategy is unlikely given the optimistic expectations most people, particularly those with college degrees, have when they begin their careers. Moreover, it may be difficult to modify unrealistic career expectations, as suggested by studies of individuals in midcareer who still have high levels of ambition and desire for upward mobility while reporting lower levels of career satisfaction.

It is also important to recognize that career satisfaction is not job satisfaction. It is easy to see how satisfaction with career as a whole, covering all jobs, is conceptually differentiated from job satisfaction, which is usually a person's satisfaction with a single job, typically the job he or she currently holds or most recently held. Even if one were tempted to consider career satisfaction as the average level of job satisfaction across jobs, we would not know which direction satisfaction is going or how satisfaction is impacted by nonjob variables such as work-nonwork dynamics or changes in personality. Another important distinction often made is that career satisfaction represents a subjective indicator of career success, as distinguished from objective indicators of career success, such as salary or earnings and promotions or professional advancement.

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