4 Steps to Discover Your Work Values and How They Can Lead to Career Success

Work values are the beliefs, preferences, and ideals you hold about the way you like to work. They’re the factors that motivate you, drive you to work better, and make you happy. Your work values might include autonomy, creative expression, inclusion, loyalty, or flexibility.

In an environment that shares and promotes your work values, you’ll feel enthused and fulfilled. But working for a company that underrates or even clashes with your values may lead to feelings of resentment and exclusion.

Let’s look at how being aware of your personal work values can improve your career.

How Can Knowing Your Work Values Help?

Being aware of your work values brings plenty of advantages. Here are the most common:

• Your work values provide a great starting point for finding a suitable new job and employer.
• Knowing your work values means that you can avoid companies that don’t align with your values. It saves you time and effort.
• Before you apply for a job, you can compare your values to the employer’s values to make sure you’re a good match.
• Knowing that your values align, you can demonstrate these values in the way you word your application letter and CV and answer interview questions. This increases your chances of standing out from other candidates.
• Working with a company that shares your values increases your chances of work satisfaction and career longevity.

Knowing your work values helps you to find employers and work environments where you can be your most effective and happiest.

4 Steps to Identify Your Work Values

Now you know what work values are and how they can help your job search and career, here’s how to identify your own work values in four actionable steps.

1. Consider what motivates you

Or to put it another way, what makes you happy? What fulfils you at work? What makes you want to do better and be your best self? This isn’t a case of what ‘should’ motivate you, like salary or the prospect of promotion. Instead, consider what truly motivates you on a personal level. Take the time to reflect on the following:

• Past job satisfaction. When have you felt engaged and fulfilled at work? What tasks or experiences led to that feeling? It might have been working in a team where you felt you could make a valuable contribution. It could have been the fact that you were given autonomy over your workload. Focus on the elements that created that feeling of job satisfaction.
• Purpose and passion. What are you passionate about in life? Is it making a difference in the lives of people like you or protecting the environment, for instance? What gives you purpose and makes you feel useful? That might be helping people to find a job, fighting injustice, or taking a leadership role.
• Personal growth. Motivation is often about where you want your life and career path to lead. Where do you want to go? Does paying off your mortgage, gaining recognition, or landing a leadership role motivate you, for instance?

Everyone has a different set of motivating factors, so don’t compare yourself to anyone else when carrying out this exercise.

2. Identify your work preferences

Your work preferences describe the way you like to work. The exact combination of work preference factors varies from person to person, but it generally includes:

• Job characteristics. What type of tasks, responsibilities, and challenges do you prefer?
• Employer. What kind of company culture is the best fit for you, including company mission, company values, and workplace environment?
• Leader and colleague relationships. Do you thrive in a team environment or prefer to work alone and with a high level of autonomy?
• Compensation and benefits. Are you motivated by salary and bonus payments, or are the type of perks offered by an employer, such as pension contributions and health plan, just as important?
• Work conditions. Is it important that you can work flexibly, have the freedom to work remotely when you want, or can work evenings? Would you prefer a particular type of physical workplace, for instance, one that provides ample access for a wheelchair?

Your work preferences will clarify which jobs and employers are a good fit for you.

3. Decide on your priorities

Steps 1 and 2 should have already provided you with several work values, but not all of those values will be of equal importance to you. For instance, autonomy may not be as important as the option to work flexibly, or flexible working may not be as important as an inclusive work environment.

Decide on your priorities by dividing your work values into three categories:

• Essential. These values are non-negotiable and represent the core principles that you can’t compromise on.
• Important. These values matter to you but may allow for some flexibility.
• Nice to have. These are desirable but not necessarily a deal-breaker.

This will leave you with a list of the essential and most important work values to focus on in your job search.

4. Take a test

If you’re still undecided after carrying out steps 1, 2 and 3, or you just don’t know where to start, a personality test may help. Here are three free tests to get you started:

• 16 personalities (based on the Myers Briggs Indicator Test)
• Enneagram test
• Big Five test