How important is your job?

I can’t claim original thinking on the insight into job importance that I’m about to give you. Even though the idea isn’t mine I can’t find it on the internet after trying a couple of searches, so I’m going to write it down.

I was prompted to write this post after meeting a chap at an entrepreneur’s event this week who, when I asked him what he did, said “toy maker”. I was so jealous. My job – director at a software house that licences a policy administration platform to specialist brokers – is much harder to say in two words. And also much harder to explain to a 5-year-old.

For those of you wondering how important your job is – here’s a graph to tell you. Simply estimate, in seconds, how long it would take to explain your job to a 5-year-old. Find that number of seconds on the horizontal axis. Run your finger up till you hit the line, take a left, and there you go: your job importance scored out of 10!

If you feel, like me, that it’d take a bit longer than 10 seconds and that maybe ‘never’ ought to be an option, then I feel your pain