The happiest professions in the world

Discovering your vocation and achieving happiness at work is fundamental to your day-to-day life. In addition, fitting into a good work team where you will find friends and good contacts will help create a climate of personal and professional satisfaction.

But let's not talk in the abstract, let's be concrete, let's measure. If we want to have such measurements with respect to happiness, we must make measurements in its multiple dimensions. The Gallup consulting firm, famous for its global surveys, measures happiness on an 11-point scale, where the highest step would be the best possible life and the last step the worst possible life. Gallup then asks respondents to indicate which step they are currently on. From all these surveys, Gallup looked at this rating and investigated the extent to which people experience positive and negative affective states such as enjoyment, stress and worry in their daily lives, as well as looking at more specific responses related to the workplace, such as the job itself, job satisfaction and employee engagement.

"Which jobs are the happiest?

1. Happiest professions by category

Eleven types of jobs are captured in Gallup's global survey. The available categories cover a wide range of job types, from business owner, office worker, civil servant or manager, working in agriculture, construction, mining or transportation.

A general pattern is that people working in manual jobs report lower levels of happiness in any of the world's regions. These occupations would include construction, mining, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, fishing and forestry.

People around the world who classify themselves as managers, executives and civil servants rate the quality of their lives higher than 6, while people working in agriculture, fishing or forestry rate their lives around 4.5 out of 10 on average.

Many other studies have also tried to catalog the best jobs in the world. For example, if we compare a survey carried out by The Guardian in the United Kingdom and a study launched by the magazine Forbes magazine a few years ago, we can find out which are the happiest professions in the world according to the workers themselves.

The British newspaper concludes that engineers are the ones who most enjoy their work, and among the things they value most about their profession are teamwork, the possibility of trying out new ideas and being able to create useful designs for industry. Nowadays, engineering is the leader in hiring, which helps engineers to feel fulfilled with their chosen career and profession. In addition, the salaries they receive are very competitive and there is always a demand in any foreign country.

In second and third position are teachers and nurses. In both cases there is a common characteristic that adds value to the work: the close and direct contact with people and the satisfaction of helping others.

Doctors are ranked fourth in the report by The Guardianand are among the highest paid professionals (globally). Of their profession, they themselves highlight the possibility of improving the lives of their patients and meeting very valuable and interesting people. Studying medicine is a difficult challenge that requires perseverance and effort. That is why those who reach the top and achieve their dream enjoy it every day. Doctors themselves highlight as another advantage of their profession the continuous learning and discovering situations in patients never seen before.

In addition, it has been observed that outdoor jobs are some of the most satisfying jobs for those who do them.

For its part, the magazine Forbes magazine made a top 10 list of the happiest professions, in which the marketing specialist stands out as the happiest job in the world according to a study by CareerBliss. Marketing specialists are followed by recruiters, teaching assistants, network developers and marketing managers.

2. Determining factors in the happiest professions

Leaving aside specific professions, where researchers do seem to agree is that money and fame play small roles in generating happiness at work. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't be happy at work while enjoying a high salary. But we may need to focus on a number of other factors first. For example, the following factors have been cited in various surveys and psychological research studies as significant contributors to happiness at work:

1. Autonomy, freedom, independence, or sense of control.
2. A job that we find exciting.
3. Work that has a clear purpose and easily recognizable results.
4. A job that is focused on making other people happy, taking care of them or solving their problems.
5. A creative expression or a sense of personal connection with others or something greater.
6. Outdoor or conventional out-of-office work.
7. Challenging work without being daunting.
8. A job that allows us to use our personal strengths, which, among others, can be:

And what can we say about the self-employed? Self-employment is complicated.

Being self-employed has a multifaceted relationship with well-being. When we look at global averages, we see that self-employment is generally associated with lower levels of happiness compared to being a full-time employee. But follow-up analyses indicate that this is highly dependent on the region of the world being considered, as well as the measure of subjective well-being being considered. In most developed countries, we find that being self-employed is associated with both a higher evaluation of life in general, as well as more negative daily emotions, such as stress and worry.

3. Unemployment

What about unemployment? Being unemployed is the worst thing that can happen to your happiness.

One of the strongest findings in the economics of happiness is that unemployment is destructive to people's well-being. We find that this holds true for everyone. Employed people rate the quality of their lives much higher on average compared to the unemployed. People who are unemployed also report about 30 percent more negative emotional experiences in their daily lives.

Incidentally, the importance of having a job extends far beyond the salary attached to it. A wealth of research has shown that the non-monetary aspects of employment are also key drivers of people's well-being. Social status, social relationships, daily structure and goals exert a strong influence on people's happiness.

Not only are the unemployed generally unhappier than those with jobs, in our analyses we found that people generally do not adjust over time to becoming unemployed. More than this, periods of unemployment also appear to have a devastating effect on people's well-being, even after they have regained employment.

The experience of unemployment can be devastating for the individual concerned, but it also affects those around them. Family members and friends of the unemployed are often affected, of course, but the secondary effects go even further. High levels of unemployment often increase people's sense of job insecurity and negatively affect the happiness of even those who are still employed.

" Conclusion.

Although we have focused here on the role of work in shaping people's happiness, it is worth noting that the relationship between happiness and employment is a complex and dynamic interaction that runs in both directions. In fact, recent research shows us that work and employment are not only drivers of people's happiness, but that happiness itself can help shape labor market outcomes, productivity, and even business performance. So being happy at work is not just a personal matter; it's also an economic one.

And you, what do you think is the profession that makes its workers happiest? What makes you happy in your job?

AUTHOR: CARLOS LLERENA

IT executive, entrepreneur, communicator and academic with international trajectory, expert in technology, marketing, project management and complex problem solving.

On the cover: image from the film The Dead Poets' Club