Job Crafting: Building a Career That Fits You
Your career isn’t a fixed job title. Job crafting means reshaping your tasks, relationships, and perspective to better align with your strengths and values, creating more meaning and fulfillment at work.
By Anna Wong
Beyond the Two-Door Career Path
In healthcare, career paths often feel like a narrow hallway with only two doors: stay in direct patient care or get into management.
This binary choice leaves many professionals feeling stuck, burned out, or disengaged.
But those aren’t the only options.
Job crafting opens up new ways to create meaning and build a career portfolio. A career that reflects who you are and what matters most to you.
Instead of waiting for the “perfect role” to pop up on indeed.com, you can craft your current job into something more energizing, sustainable, and personally and professionally rewarding.
The Hospital Cleaner Story: Finding Meaning in the Mundane
Organizational psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied hospital cleaners and discovered a divide. On paper, all held the same role: ensuring a clean environment for patients and staff. Yet how they described and experienced their work differed dramatically.
Some saw their duties as routine, physical tasks: emptying trash, scrubbing floors, changing linens. They felt invisible within the hospital system and disconnected from its larger mission.
Others described their work as a vital part of the healing process. They reported moving equipment to improve patient safety, taking time to comfort families, and carefully arranging rooms so patients felt more at ease.
The difference wasn’t in the formal job description but in how the cleaners crafted their jobs.
Through cognitive crafting, they reframed their role from “janitorial work” to “supporting recovery.” This shift gave them a stronger sense of purpose, greater engagement, and more resilience in the face of daily challenges (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).
Three Pathways to Job Craft
There are three pathways to craft a job that is personally and professionally fulfilling.
Task crafting: Adjusting what you do.
This involves reshaping your responsibilities by adding, removing, or redesigning tasks so your work better aligns with your strengths and interests.
Reflective questions:
What tasks energize me, and how can I do more of them?
Which tasks drain me, and can I delegate or redesign them?
Is there a project I could volunteer for that aligns with my strengths?
Relational crafting: Adjusting who you interact with.
This means shaping the relationships at work. This may include seeking out energizing connections, building new collaborations, or mentoring others.
Reflective questions:
Who at work leaves me feeling energized, and how can I spend more time with them?
Are there mentors, colleagues, or partners I could collaborate with to grow my role?
How can I contribute to others’ growth in ways that feel meaningful?
Cognitive crafting: Adjusting how you see your work.
This is about reframing your mindset. This is about changing how you interpret tasks so they connect more deeply to your values, purpose, and identity.
Reflective questions:
How does my work contribute to something larger than myself?
What stories can I tell myself about the purpose behind my daily tasks?
In what ways does my role connect to my values or strengths?
Together, these pathways allow you to design a career portfolio: A blend of roles, projects, and collaborations that reflect your skills and values.
Reinvention as a Seasoned Clinician
For new clinicians, job crafting often centers on building identity and confidence within their role.
But after five or more years, many seasoned clinicians crave something different: novelty, variety, and career progression.
At this stage, repeating the same 1:1 patient care day after day can feel limiting. What sustains engagement is often a diversity of tasks—facilitating group programs, precepting students, mentoring colleagues, teaching workshops, or stepping into leadership and advocacy.
These opportunities break routine, add intellectual excitement and create what positive psychology calls psychological richness: experiences that are novel, diverse, and perspective-shifting.
This stage of practice is about reinvention: expanding beyond the basics of clinical expertise into roles that challenge and inspire.
By deliberately crafting new responsibilities and relationships, seasoned clinicians can maintain vitality, reduce boredom, and cultivate a career structure that supports long-term well-being.
One Small Step to Get Started
This month, choose one area to craft:
Task: Volunteer for a project that excites you or drop one that drains you.
Relational: Reach out to a colleague who inspires you and explore collaboration.
Cognitive: Reframe one daily responsibility by asking, “How does this connect to helping others, learning, or growth?”
References & Suggested Readings
Berg, J. M., Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2013). Job crafting and meaningful work. In B. J. Dik, Z. S. Byrne, & M. F. Steger (Eds.), Purpose and meaning in the workplace (pp. 81–104). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Oxford University Press.
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201.
Wrzesniewski, A., LoBuglio, N., Dutton, J. E., & Berg, J. M. (2013). Job crafting and cultivating positive meaning and identity in work. In A. B. Bakker (Ed.), Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 281–302). London: Emerald.
