You spend 90,000 hours at work – one third of your life!
So job satisfaction matters.
If the effort you put in every day is leading you towards your objective you feel you are achieving something, you’re moving forwards. You’re satisfied.
Sometimes your way forwards is blocked and the only way to achieve job satisfaction is to change jobs. But how can you be sure you choose the right opportunity – especially with so many options in our rapidly evolving digital built environment which is creating exciting new thought leaders but also more dinosaurs. Some are trail blazing, innovating and pushing the boundaries while others simply don’t want change. Some are modernising. Some will die.
A couple of years ago I was helping one of the best young BIM Coordinators I had seen in a long time find the best career move. Since leaving uni they had been well honed by an excellent mentor but after 4 years had run out of room to grow. We defined what good looked like and I started contacting our best employers. 2 days later, courtesy of another agency, they were offered a BIM Lead role and a salary that was ‘impossible to refuse’. They accepted. 6 months later it was a different story. The company were never interested in digital transformation and they certainly weren’t prepared for the level of investment required. The role had become highly political – trying to convince the boardroom what was needed and blinkered PMs why they should change their ways! He/she was way out of their depth, doing a job they didn’t enjoy, falling behind the BIM trail blazers BUT on a great salary. In the end they took a pay cut and got back on the right path with a great team – moving forwards far faster, innovating again, achieving and sleeping well at night!
The moral. Do your research properly and don’t listen to amateurs.
How do you differentiate the good employers that will help you succeed from the arm-wavers that will, at best, stagnate your career or worse, kill it? Websites rarely provide the detail you need and if they do, are they telling the whole truth about their commitment to digital – or you?
There are 5 key questions you need the answers to – ideally before you apply for a job, certainly before you accept one!
1: Vision: Make sure you are joining a stable business that will still be here in 10 years’ time. Ask how they are modernising. Where are they on their digital journey? What is their digital vision? If they don’t have a digital vision, RUN! Especially if they ask you to write it!!
2: Leadership: Who is their digital leader? Are they simply a figurehead to tick a PQQ box or are they empowered to keep the business on the right path. Will they inspire you?
3: Culture: Do other people love working there? Is it an exciting place to be? Why? It’s all well and good having sexy benefits but how do they encourage and teach you how to do the job the best you can? How do they reward you doing the job well?
“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t want to.” (Mr. Branson)
4: Promotion: Is there a structured career path? One of our best clients sits down with new recruits on day one to build a personalised career plan and rewards them at each milestone.
5: Well-being: Put the effort in, get the effort out. Good employers know a good work-life balance leads to a healthier, happier team. What effort do they make to ensure balance? Or do they still think it’s ‘part of the job’ to have last minute, caffeine swamped, all-nighters to hit impossible deadlines?
Find out why I believe the good Digital Construction Consultancies offer great job satisfaction.