How Do I Know I’m Taking the Right Job?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

That’s the million-dollar question for a lot of job seekers — what’s the right job for me, and how do I get it?

Only you can know whether you’re in the right job, but here are some fundamental tips to help figure out how good a match your job is for you.

Fitting Your Skills and Strengths

One of the very basic paradigms that job experts will talk about is making sure you’re doing the things that you’re best at. This goes along with doing things that fulfill you and make you feel good about your job, but when it comes to success, getting back to competencies and strengths is even more fundamental. If you’re doing something that you’re not good at, it’s going to be a struggle and a continual burden. So you always want to target jobs to those things that you can do better than others.

Fitting Your Values

People also feel a lot better about their jobs when they fit the values and the standards that they set for themselves. Fitting values can be a question of getting into the right industry — for example, if you love solar power and work in coal, you’re likely to be very unhappy. It can be a question of getting into a company that values families or working women or consensus-based leadership. Whatever it is, make sure that the jobs you pursue are ones that resonate with your individual values.

Opportunity for Advancement

In many people’s views, the right job is also something they can stay in for the long term. There are plenty of jobs that offer a good fit, but might not provide for someone’s long-term needs, because they are only designed to be a temporary solution. You see this particularly in low-wage industries. Along with fitting your values and your skills, jobs should offer longevity, advancement and rewards for long-term commitment, or they might not be worth the effort.

Support

As with so much else in the work world, support is key. If you have all these other things, but you feel unsupported by teams, unsupported by leadership and really in it by yourself, you are likely to burn out or get disillusioned with the job over time. People essentially have to work together to grow a business — it can be the type of thing where different levels of staff are adversarial toward each other, or where unrealistic expectations from the top keep people from loving their jobs and achieving different kinds of success – but lack of support can be a real morale-killer.

Look for the hallmarks of a good job wherever you apply. Don’t be afraid to ask about corporate culture – because at the end of the day, how values align and how a business supports its employees makes all of the difference in long-term results. For more, keep an eye on the Full Steam Staffing blog.

About Full Steam Staffing

Full Steam Staffing is a full-service employment agency focused on providing clerical and light industrial staffing solutions to manufacturers, distribution centers and other organizations that need qualified, reliable workers. If you are looking for a new job in Modesto, California, browse our available opportunities or contact our team today!