Martin Seligman, the champion of positive psychology, has written extensively on job satisfaction. He argues that most people can achieve complete happiness within a wide array of jobs. In his book Authentic Happiness, Seligman differentiates between three types of work:

Job – a basic way of working where somebody needs to earn money and they do not get much satisfaction or reward from their efforts.

Occupation – higher-quality work that usually involves a qualification, better rewards and advancement. However, people may not particularly enjoy what they do.

Calling – where someone is involved in work that aligns with their purpose in life. These are ‘dream jobs’ that people enjoy and tend to personally develop within.

This way of classifying work leads on to the question - how do you find your purpose in life? Seligman and his team of psychologists in the University of Pennsylvania have proposed that people are governed by six core values and that we all have a mix of 24 associated character strengths.

Seligman contends that when someone gets to understand their character strengths and goes on to focus on these in work and in other parts of their life,such people find their purpose. They are then able to move into work that fundamentally suits them, plays to their strengths, and provides deep-rooted and sustainable satisfaction.

According to Seligman, we are all governed by the following six core values:

• Wisdom
• Courage
• Love
• Justice
• Temperance
• Transcendence

It is not possible to cover the 24 character strengths proposed by Seligman within this article, but they are all identified in a useful summary of the book, Authentic Happiness that you can watch on YouTube here.

There is a myriad of information on this subject on the Authentic Happiness / University of Pennsylvania website here. The questionnaires section is particularly useful for anyone interested in doing self-appraisal exercises.

Assessment exercises on this website can be completed free of charge. The Workplace PERMA Profiler and the VIA Survey of Character Strengths are particularly useful.