18 Apr High Happiness Professions
People looking for jobs that bring satisfaction and happiness should concentrate on professions that focus primarily on serving other people, according to a new report from the University of Chicago.
“The most satisfying jobs are mostly professions, especially those involving caring for, teaching, and protecting others and creative pursuits,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey (GSS) at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
The survey is the most comprehensive of its kind to explore satisfaction and happiness among American workers. The GSS asks a large variety of questions of a representative sample of Americans in face-to-face interviews.
In the 2006 GSS survey, interviewers asked people how satisfied they were with their jobs. The interviewers also asked them about their general level of happiness and Smith correlated those general happiness findings with the jobs people held. People’s feelings about their work usually have a significant impact on their happiness, he said.
Across all occupations, on average, 47 percent of people said they were very satisfied with their jobs and 33 percent said they were very happy.
The top three jobs for satisfaction were clergy (87 percent reporting being very satisfied), firefighters (80 percent) and physical therapists (78 percent). Other top jobs, in which more than 60 percent of the respondents said they were very satisfied, were education administrators, painters and sculpters, teachers, authors, psychologists, special education teachers, operating engineers, office supervisors, and security and financial services salespersons.
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