Friends, career consultants and the media inundate us with a constant barrage of advice telling us to follow our dreams, find our bliss or pursue our passions in our professional lives. Yet this kind of advice is not always easily followed.
Even when it’s heeded, the advice can come with downsides, especially when it turns out that those aforementioned passions involve jobs with routine, day-to-day tasks that people are less than passionate about. In short, work is often hard work.
People land jobs in data science and artificial intelligence, for example, expecting to create brilliant algorithms that will solve big problems. But they often end up performing menial data collection and cleaning tasks. The excitement of working for a startup loses its lustre with difficult and boring work often outside an employee’s primary areas of interest.
And not everyone promoted to the lauded ranks of management is thrilled to be there performing management tasks, or even see the job as a step up.
People romanticise working in the media, fashion, film, fine and performing arts and other cultural industries, but the work often ends up being more drudgery than glamour. Any job, especially an entry-level position, has elements of drudgery.
'Glossy work' is lacklustre
This gap between expectations and the day-to-day reality of jobs is a phenomenon we’ve labelled as “glossy work” in a recently published study.
For the study, we interviewed magazine fact-checkers who worked for high-status organizations in a glamorous industry while performing menial tasks every day. They experienced a kind of dissonance between their work and its setting.
As one fact-checker described it: "Because you’re affiliated with the magazine, people think you’re a strange type of royalty no matter how you’re affiliated.”
We examined how this phenomenon affects them.
For employees, the glossy work dissonance can spur attempts to change the actual job, frustration and a quick exit from the position. Glossy work also creates a dilemma about how to present the work and themselves to the world. How do they balance their simultaneous needs for self-enhancement and to be fully understood and authentic?