Important Employment Choice Questions This document discusses important questions to consider before accepting a new job: 1. What is your personality type and how it will fit the job's requirements and environment? 2. What are your current career needs and how well does the job meet them, according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs and other motivation models? 3. What values are important to you and how well does the job's culture align with them to avoid future resentment? It is best to find a job that matches your personality, needs, and values to feel most motivated and perform well. If an urgent need for a job arises, focus on meeting immediate needs but plan for future motivation sources to maintain satisfaction.

1. Important Employment Choice Questions
If you are looking for a job, you may want to ask yourself the following questions before
taking the plunge:
1. What is my personality?
2. What do I need right now in my career?
3. What kind of place do I want to work?
4. What are my values?
This is because your answers to the above questions should help you determine which
role and employer suit you. You will be the happiest for it if you are able to match your
answers to these questions to a particular job and then successfully get appointed to the
role.
Your personality is very important in the choice of a job. You may be introverted or
extroverted, you may also be any of the sixteen personality factors in the Cattel’s 16
personality factors questionnaire. You may be warm, dominant, reasoning, emotionally
stable etc and these factors will determine what kind of job you naturally enjoy. For
example, if you score high on liveliness, a job that keeps you in solitude and demands a
lot of quiet may make you very uncomfortable as it is in antithesis with your natural
disposition. Complete the questionnaire, it is free and may just save you a lot of pain.
Your need will change at different times during your career. You may start off your
career looking to meet your basic needs like shelter, Food, Clothing and all, which are all
on at the bottom of the Maslow’s hierarchy of need. At another time, you may need
security, self-esteem or self-actualisation. Yours may be a need for power, achievement
or affiliation as expounded by McClelland in his achievement model. Another model
worth looking at may be the self-determination model, which also considers what may
be needs that may be sources of motivation for you in your work.
Hezberg’s two factor model will help you decide what kind of workplace you may be
interested in. He calls this the hygiene factor. You may want to find out what kind of
relationship you want with your supervisor and what, about your employer matter
most to you and you cannot do without.
Your values as a person is also very important in the determination of what kind of role
you may want to commit to. You may value family, religion, integrity, honesty and so on
and these value system needs to match the value system of your job in order for you to
derive any motivation or satisfaction from what you do. If you value religion but your
job demands that you miss your religious gatherings or celebrations, you may begin to
resent the job because it is in conflict with your value system. Likewise, if you value
honesty and your role involves a lot of dishonesty or your company’s culture in one
built of dishonesty, you may find your time at the job a tough ride.
You may not be able to match yourself to a job that matches all your answers to these
questions, which is why you must also rank these questions in order of importance,
such that if you find one without the other, you can determine to still take the job
because it provides you with the more important match. For most people, their

2. motivation at work is determined by the ability to meet their needs, express their
personality and are in a job that demands their natural disposition. You are also more
likely to be motivated when your needs are met by the job that you do, be they money,
power, self-esteem, affiliation or self-actualisation.
A highly motivated individual is more likely a high performer at work. Motivation is a
very important factor in performance. Good performance, in turn, keeps you motivated
and the increased motivation also drives better performance in a cycle. When you are
de-motivated, you face a huge challenge to succeed and are always working from the
point of weakness. Your performance takes a blow and poor performance will then
cause you to be even more demotivated and a vicious cycle is produced. If you find
yourself in this cycle, you need to get out quickly before it is too late to redeem your
career drive.
Lastly, you may want to ask, what do I do if the only job I have been offered does not
match my personality, needs and so on and I need a job desperately? Your need for the
job is then currently your motivation. Your need may be to get money, or to get out of
the unemployment market, to put your foot in the door in a new environment etc. And
there is nothing wrong with any of these. You must just realise that the needs this job is
meeting may change and if the job does not meet your future needs or if your source of
motivation changes, then you must then ask yourself, if the job can provide your next
source of motivation, which then allows you to continue to be satisfied at your job and
consequently remain motivated.