Work values: what you want from a job

In the theory of work adjustment, by René Dawis and Lloyd Lofquist (1984), a person tends to stay and do well in a job when two things meet: what they need to get from the environment and what the environment actually offers; and what the environment asks for and what they can deliver.

The “what I want to get” side was organized into six work values. The O*NET® database adopted this model to describe occupations.

The questionnaire O*NET® used to measure values, the Work Importance Profiler, is no longer distributed, and the Locator version was archived. The occupation data, each one’s profile on the six values, exists up to version 30.2 of the database and is not in 31.0, which reorganized the content model. Version 30.2 remains available in the archive, under the same CC BY 4.0 license, and that is where the Map takes the occupation values from.

There are 18 statements of IQNorth’s own, 3 for each value, on a scale from “Not important” to “Essential”. The instructions ask you to think about the job you would like to have, not the one you have today. Each value gets the average of its answers (at least 2 of the 3 must be answered), and the six become an order, from most to least important to you.

In the match with occupations, values enter like this: 0.1 × (values − 0.5), where “values” is the correlation between your six and the occupation’s six, taken onto 0 to 1. In practice, this term moves the score by at most 0.05 up or down. It breaks ties between occupations with similar interest scores and appears as an explanation when one of your top two values is among the occupation’s three strongest (“matches what you value”).

There are three reasons for the small weight. The statements are new and have no validation study yet. The occupation data comes from an earlier version of the database, and it is missing for 8 of the 183 occupations in the catalog. And job satisfaction depends on a lot that no questionnaire sees: in a review of 105 studies, interest fit was related to satisfaction at only 0.19 (Hoff et al., 2020), because management, coworkers and pay weigh heavily.

Shalom Schwartz’s model of human values is the most studied across cultures: the revised version of the questionnaire was tested in 49 cultural groups (Schwartz & Cieciuch, 2022). But it describes life values, not work values, and the link to occupations would be indirect. Besides, the instruments are under a non-commercial license. It is useful reading for understanding values; it is not the Map’s yardstick.

• When comparing two occupations with similar interest scores, look at which one offers more of what sits at the top of your list.
• When talking with someone who works in the field, ask about your top two values: autonomy day to day, recognition, pace, relationships.
• Values change with the stage of life. Take the Map again after 6 months and compare.