The Meaning of Work Changes as We Do
By Sabrina Orque
Years later, an employee will sometimes say to me, “You gave me my first opportunity.” It catches me every time. A client might tell me that something I shared helped them make a difficult decision or changed how they handled a situation. Those moments stay with me. Not because they prove I chose the perfect profession or that every part of working in HR is meaningful to me. They remind me that something I did was useful to someone.
That is difficult to know when we are first choosing what we want to do. We are asked relatively early to decide what to study, what kind of work interests us and where we think it might lead. We are making those choices before we have enough experience to know which parts of working will actually matter to us. And sometimes the honest answer is simply: I don’t know yet.
That may be more normal than we make it sound. We often discover what matters to us about work only after we have spent some time doing it. Someone can choose a profession because the subject interests them and later realize that what they really enjoy is teaching other people. Someone else can take a job largely because they need the paycheck and unexpectedly find people, responsibilities or problems they genuinely care about.
For some people, much of the meaning of work is found inside the work itself. For others, part of its meaning is what work makes possible outside of it. A paycheck that creates security, supports a family, provides independence or gives someone more choices in life is not a lesser reason to work. Work does not have to be your calling to have value.
What makes work meaningful can change, too. The things we work toward can matter enormously: getting the first real job, earning more money, being promoted, becoming good at something, buying a home, supporting a family or building a reputation in a field. But eventually, some of what we worked toward becomes part of our regular life. The promotion becomes the job. The raise becomes the salary. The expertise that once felt new becomes something other people simply expect us to have.
There is an odd contradiction in that. You can be proud of what you built and still wonder what comes next. You can get something you worked hard for and be surprised that reaching it feels flatter than you expected. You can enjoy your profession and still question whether you want to keep doing it. And you can dislike parts of a job while finding real meaning in another part of it.
I have had periods when I have wondered whether I even still liked working in HR. After enough years in any profession, I think that can be a fair question. But when I think about the moments that pull me back into the work, they are rarely about HR as a profession. They are the consulting conversations when someone is really listening, when I can help untangle something difficult, or when I realize that something I know made another person’s situation better.
Those can also be some of the most demanding parts of the work. Helping people, carrying responsibility and working through complicated situations can take a lot out of you. Meaningful does not necessarily mean easy, enjoyable or something you would want to do every minute of every day. The work that matters most can also ask the most from us.
Over the years, I’ve talked with a lot of people who were questioning their work. What I’ve noticed is that the question underneath it is not always about the career itself.
The job title and the source of meaning are not always the same thing.
We can like the field and lose touch with the part of it we care about. We can question the field and still find real meaning in one part of the work.
The environment matters, too. A strong mission can help us understand what an organization is trying to accomplish and where our work fits. The people around us can also open doors we may not have seen for ourselves by giving us an opportunity, trusting us with something new or simply noticing what we bring. None of that can decide what work means to us, but it can make it easier to discover.
There is a part that belongs to us, too. We have to notice which parts of our work still feel worthwhile. We may need to raise our hand, try something different or admit that something that mattered to us five or ten years ago no longer does. That does not automatically mean the career is wrong or that it is time to leave. It may simply mean our relationship with the work has changed.
Sometimes the question is not whether the work still means something. It is whether we are still connected to the part of it that does.
What makes your work meaningful to you now?
