This month’s podcasts are covering the importance of incorporating your skills, values, personality, and areas of expertise into your career decision.
Remember that your career decision is on a macro- and micro-level: Choosing the career field you will pursue, and the jobs within that career field. Even on a more micro-level, this self-knowledge will help you decide which assignments, projects, or committees you volunteer for – or you boss assigns you to.
Today, I want to talk about your core values…what is most important to you in an employer, a work environment, and the specific work you’re doing.
Identifying these “non-negotiable” values helps you align your career choices with what is most important to you. And alignment increases your chance for career success, compensation, and satisfaction.
Here’s how you use this information:
-If there is a career or specific job you are considering, evaluate it against your core values to determine how well it meshes with your values.
-If you are exploring careers, look for those that hold your most important values. No matter how many “niceties” the career might have, if it doesn’t offer the value you hold most important, you won’t be satisfied.
Note that some of your values may apply to a career as a whole; other values may be job-specific. For example, “Using physical strength/coordination” is a universal value for a career in physical therapy. Within the career of physical therapy, however, some jobs may satisfy a value of “work on a team,” whereas other jobs may be geared more towards a value of “opportunity to work independently.”

Here are the values on the sort activity:
Utilize physical strength and coordination
Utilize courage and take risks
Utilize creativity and originality
Opportunity for advancement
Ability to do a job as efficiently as possible
Receive recognition for accomplishments
Ability to exert power and influence
Higher than average financial rewards
Ability to help and serve others
Ability to teach and train others
Search for knowledge and truth
Closer relationships with co-workers
Opportunity for continued learning
Opportunity to work independently
Good relationship with manager
Job security
Intellectual challenge
Ability to freely express faith and beliefs
Ability to exert authority and leadership
Ability to give ideas and suggestions
Respond to problems or emergencies
Perform clearly defined tasks
Ability to complete tasks with autonomy
Flexibility in work hours and schedule
Work on a team
Quality, luxurious surroundings
Earnings directly tied to your contribution
A quiet workspace
Opportunity to travel frequently
Experimenting with different solutions
Highly structured environment
Unstructured, open environment
Variety of work tasks
Having a fixed set of tasks
Working on multiple projects simultaneously
Working on one project at a time
A competitive work environment
Work that mentally challenges you
Receive clear instructions

Let’s play out a couple of examples. Let’s say your 5 top values are:
Utilize physical strength and coordination
Utilize courage and take risks
Respond to problems or emergencies
Unstructured, open environment
Opportunity to travel frequently

Does this sound like the values of an accountant? A school teacher? A writer?
What comes to mind is someone who takes groups out on extreme vacations…hiking, rafting, horseback riding.
See how these values play into that career choice? Here’s another example:

Someone’s top 5 values are:
Ability to exert power and influence
Higher than average financial rewards
Competitive work environment
Work that mentally challenges you
Quality, luxurious surroundings
These would be ideal values for someone entering the field of law, particularly in private practice (their value of higher than average financial rewards might not be satisfied working for the DA’s office, and they probably wouldn’t have quality, luxurious surroundings there, either).
There are no right or wrong answers here, and there are an i