Celebrate Canada Career Week with Kyosei
Are you passionate about your career? Do you feel like your work energizes and inspires you? Does it allow you the balance and freedom to spend time with friends and family and pursue your other passions?
Today marks the first day of Canada Career Week 2015. This year’s theme is “Decent Work, Healthy Lives.” While decent work is important (and not enough people have it), we set our sights higher. We want to help you find work that you love, that energizes you and also allows you to live a healthy, balanced life. It’s a tall order, we know, but it isn’t impossible!
The Canadian situation
When we bring up career alignment and loving your work, we sometimes hear a familiar refrain. Many people — particularly older workers — say “Your job is what you do for money; you’re not supposed to love it.” Thankfully, we hear this less and less as the years go by, and we meet more and more people who’ve tapped into their innate desires and creativity to find work so aligned with their passions that they would find a way to keep doing it even if they could no longer get paid.
In Canada, the employee engagement and career satisfaction situation is not bad — relative to the rest of the world, at least. We tend to lead in job satisfaction surveys, and, even though some studies have found that only 16% of Canadian workers are engaged with their work, this number is quite high compared to other countries surveyed.
Some optimism might be in order, but this much is clear: our work isn’t done yet.
Clarity is key to happiness at work
From years of work with both career seekers and company leadership, we’ve found that the basis for happy workers and engaged workplaces is clarity on what you want to do and how that meets the needs of the company. Clarity lights the path for your ideal career; otherwise, you’re liable to stumble off the path entirely and end up doing something you never wanted.
Career clarity and employee engagement aren’t easy to improve, and you won’t fix everything overnight. One thing is for sure: when career-seekers are clear about what drives them, everybody wins. Company leadership can task employees with work they’ll be more productive with, and employees will be happier, feeling energized rather than drained from their work.
Want to get on the cutting edge of the happy workplace revolution? Come back to Kyosei Coaching throughout the week for great tips on how to find out what you want to do — and then do it!
