Job satisfaction a great motivator
The first job I had was a school vacation job. We lived in a copper mine, and my father lined me up with a job as “junior geological assistant,” a fake title with a tiny salary paid from petty cash. I was 12 years old, and the job was meant to keep me out of trouble over the six-week Christmas break. You know the saying: “The devil finds bad things for idle hands.”
I loved the job, exploring vast expanses of the Northern Territory with the chief geologist, Barney Elliston, who was a god to me. He’d fill up the water bags, load a couple of geologist’s picks into the Landrover, go to the diner and pick up two lunches and we’d be on our way. There are no roads, just a few maps and a compass. I often wondered how Barney managed to get us back home, but he always did.
We would search old gold mining sites and check the terrain for rocks and minerals with hard-to-pronounce names. This was the fun part, the boring job came one day when I was introduced to the “core cracker”. As its name rightly suggests, a kernel cracker breaks kernels. Thousands of feet of core at about 15 inches per hit.
A core cracker is a heavy metal object with a wheel set horizontally on top of which are opposite horizontal blades. The core is placed on the bottom sheet and the wheel rotates downward pushing the top sheet against the core until it breaks.
To operate, a piece of diamond drill core was taken from a core tray, a sample bag from the assay office was placed on one side of the core cracker, and the wheel on top was turned clockwise. clockwise, taking it down over the core until it broke. Half was placed in the core bag and the other half was carefully replaced in the core tray. Details of the tray number and core sample footage were written on a label and the sample bag was taken to the testing office at the end of the day.
Spending two or three hours figuring out endless pieces of kernel is boring. Now, I hope there’s a more modern process for anyone unfortunate enough to have to spend their workday breaking off chunks of drilled rock. But for me, once or twice during the school holidays was enough. It was certainly a good motivator to find a better job.
Jobs with Job Satisfaction
I left school near the end of my 14th year and by luck or design, I worked in various jobs with a high focus on people. I also continued my education since I was 30 years old, got married and had a baby. Perhaps the most interesting jobs with the highest job satisfaction were teaching business and computing to adult students in TAFE and industry and being a human resources (HR) specialist.
Teaching had variety because one had different students, different courses, and different subjects to teach. It was a demanding occupation (don’t listen to those who tell you that the teachers are lazy) but I loved the interaction of the students and the topics were so wide and varied that I never got bored. There was always an opportunity to experiment with the way one designed a class, delivered it, or taught the topics. At the end of the day, I always felt like I had achieved something and that I was helping people to progress.
Human Resources has a staff training and development component that aligns well with my teacher background (although teaching and training are different). HR also covers a wide range of other topics including:
- Recruitment and selection
- Payroll and other terms of service
- worker’s compensation
- Security and health at work
- Succession plan
- Strategic and operational HR planning
- organizational management
- Performance management
Working in different areas of HR provided new challenges, new opportunities to learn more than what had been taken from the textbooks. Because it’s not something you can experience in a year or two, it manages to fill a large part of one’s career. Issues such as Worker’s Compensation (care for people injured at work) are subject to legislation in different states and territories in Australia, so if you go ultra-efficient in Western Australia and move to the Australian Capital Territory, you need to come back to train.
HR tends to be undervalued in many organizations because it’s a people function, meaning it doesn’t produce tons of coal, gadgets, or billable hours for the organization. If you work for an organization that realizes the value of an efficient and effective HR function, you can have a truly great career with high levels of challenge and high job satisfaction.
Someone said, “Love the work you do and do the work you love.” It’s grammatically messy, but it’s true. Find a job that interests you and put your heart and soul into it. Promise yourself that you won’t be just another pilot, engineer, administrative worker, mechanic and machinist, but that you will be among the best in your class. And when you look back at the end of your career, you can do so with a sense of fulfillment, accomplishment, and success.
Having a job that provides job satisfaction is, in fact, the biggest motivator for getting out of bed each morning and heading to work. What do you think?