You Can Turn a Job You Hate Into One You Like
By Kristin Wong
Not long ago, Kate Tolo took a walk with her co-worker during their lunch break. “I’m going to quit,” she confided in her colleague. “I hate this and I can’t do it anymore.” Tolo was working for a luxury denim company in Brooklyn, and while her job title was impressive — assistant technical designer — she wasn’t happy with her daily tasks, measuring and pinning jeans for quality assurance. But she didn’t really want to quit; she liked the company and its CEO, and she was wary of starting over somewhere else. She wanted the best of both worlds: to stay at her current job anddo something she thoroughly enjoyed.
“I realized the simplest way to move forward was to change my role at my current company,” Tolo said. She asked her boss for a meeting. “He said, ‘Look, how about you submit your ideal job description?’” she recalls. She did and, eventually, she convinced him to let her take on new tasks and responsibilities, including project management, employee training sessions, and even financial meetings with the company’s CFO and CEO.
Yale researcher and professor Amy Wrzesniewski would call what Tolo did “job crafting,” her term for what happens when employees redesign their current job in a more satisfying way. Tolo changed her…
