The assumption underlying most career advice is that if you’re unhappy at work, you need to find a new job. Update your resume, scour job boards, prepare for interviews, make the leap. The entire career coaching industry revolves around helping people exit their current situations and find something better elsewhere.
But what if that assumption is wrong more often than it’s right?
In Smart Careers, Jess Annison makes a compelling case that before considering a major career change, most people should first explore whether they can extract significantly more meaning from their existing role through a practice called “job crafting.” Her research and coaching experience suggests that small, intentional adjustments to what you do, how you do it, and how you think about it can have a disproportionately large impact on fulfillment.
As she notes in the book, “Small-scale changes can have a disproportionate impact on the amount and quality of meaning you experience. In fact, they may be enough to scratch your mid-career itch.”
This isn’t about settling or lowering your standards. It’s about recognizing that most jobs contain latent possibilities for meaningfulness that remain untapped because we haven’t been intentional about surfacing them. Job crafting is the practice of actively shaping your role to align more closely with your strengths, values, and sources of fulfillment.
The Three Types of Job Crafting
Research on job crafting, which Annison synthesizes and makes practical, identifies three distinct approaches: task crafting, relationship crafting, and purpose (or cognitive) crafting. The most powerful results come from combining all three.
Task crafting involves actively reshaping what you do day-to-day. This might mean adding in new responsibilities that energize you, spending more time on the aspects of your role you find most rewarding, or—where possible—reducing or delegating tasks that drain you.
The data analyst who takes on more visualization work to satisfy their creative drive is task crafting. The secondary school teacher who adjusts lesson plans to incorporate more of the activities that engage both them and their students is task crafting. The manager who leans more heavily into developing their team members because that’s what they find most meaningful is task crafting.
The key is proactivity. You’re not passively accepting your job description as fixed. You’re actively molding it, within reasonable bounds, to better fit your strengths and interests.
Relationship crafting focuses on changing how and with whom you interact. This could mean collaborating more closely with colleagues who inspire you, spending more time with customers to better understand their needs, or seeking out mentoring relationships.
An app developer might regularly share ideas with someone in marketing to gain external perspective. A senior manager might spend time fielding customer service calls or observing focus groups to stay connected to the end-user experience. A supermarket cashier might spend extra time chatting with elderly customers who might otherwise be lonely.
These aren’t trivial adjustments. Who you interact with and the quality of those interactions fundamentally shapes your experience of work. Relationship crafting recognizes that work is inherently social and that meaning often emerges through connection with others.
Purpose crafting (also called cognitive crafting) involves changing how you think about and frame your work. It’s about the stories you tell yourself about what you do and why it matters.
The classic example is the NASA janitor who, when asked what he did, replied that he was helping put a man on the moon. He wasn’t merely sweeping floors—he was contributing to one of humanity’s greatest achievements. A software developer might see themselves as building digital services that make busy people’s lives easier. A hospital cleaner might view their work as enabling patient recovery through infection control.
This isn’t about deluding yourself or applying a superficial positive spin. It’s about shifting perspective to see the genuine significance of your contribution, even if that contribution is indirect or easily overlooked.
Why Job Crafting Works: The Science
The evidence supporting job crafting is substantial. Studies show that people who actively craft their jobs experience:
- Greater job satisfaction and happiness
- Reduced work-related stress
- Higher engagement and motivation
- Improved performance and productivity
- Better physical health outcomes
- Enhanced creativity
- Stronger career progression over time
- Greater confidence in their abilities
One of the reasons job crafting is so effective is that it restores a sense of agency. When you’re passively accepting whatever tasks and responsibilities come your way, work can feel like something happening to you. When you’re actively shaping your role, even in small ways, you reclaim a sense of control and ownership.
Additionally, job crafting allows you to better align your daily work with your core strengths. As Annison explains, strengths are “those things we’re good at and that give us energy. When we’re using our innate strengths and talents, we’re not just competent but also confident and motivated.”
When you craft your job to make better use of your strengths, you create a virtuous cycle: you perform better, which builds confidence, which makes you more willing to take on challenges, which develops your capabilities further.
The Surprising Accessibility of Job Crafting
One of the most common objections to job crafting is: “My manager would never allow it.” But Annison’s research reveals something surprising: most people have more latitude to craft their roles than they realize.
Many job crafting adjustments don’t require explicit permission from your manager because they’re subtle enough to be invisible to others. Changing how you think about your work (purpose crafting) is entirely internal. Adjusting how you interact with colleagues or the quality of attention you bring to customer conversations (relationship crafting) rarely needs approval.
Even task crafting often has more room for maneuver than expected. You might not be able to eliminate responsibilities entirely, but you can often adjust priorities, sequence tasks differently, or find more efficient ways of handling things you don’t enjoy to free up time for what you do.
Interestingly, research shows that junior employees sometimes feel more able to craft their jobs than senior colleagues, perhaps because they have less entrenched expectations about what their role “should” look like.
For more significant changes—like formally rebalancing responsibilities within a team—having your manager’s support is valuable. But the conversation doesn’t have to be framed as “I’m unhappy and want to change everything.” Instead, it can be: “I’ve noticed I’m most effective and engaged when I’m doing X. Could we explore whether there’s a way to do more of that, perhaps by reallocating Y to someone who finds it more energizing?”
Presented this way, job crafting isn’t about personal preference—it’s about optimizing team performance by better matching people’s strengths with responsibilities.
Practical Applications: What Job Crafting Looks Like in Reality
Throughout Smart Careers, Annison shares stories of people who successfully crafted more meaning into their existing roles.
There’s Anya, a recruitment consultant who felt stuck after ten years in the same field. She realized she was craving deeper connection with people. Rather than leaving recruitment, she used new coaching skills she’d learned to help candidates develop more effective job search strategies (task crafting). She volunteered for a long-term client project that would suit her relationship-building strengths (relationship crafting). And she actively reflected on how her work was helping people and organizations do great work they loved (purpose crafting).
Another example from the book involves someone leading a communications team who was feeling increasingly unfulfilled. Through job crafting, she started spending more time developing her team members, shook up how she ran one-on-one meetings to focus more on growth conversations, and initiated career discussions with junior team members. She also reframed her thinking about routine executive communications, shifting from seeing it as “putting lipstick on pigs” to “helping the organization share what it’s up to and why, making complex things simpler.”
These aren’t dramatic transformations. They’re intentional, thoughtful adjustments that cumulatively shift the experience of work from draining to energizing.
The Job Crafting Process: Making It Systematic
Annison recommends approaching job crafting systematically rather than haphazardly. Her job crafting plan template guides you through several steps:
First, consider each category—task, relationship, and purpose crafting—and identify potential adjustments. For each possibility, note what the adjustment would be, why you think it will be more fulfilling, what first step would make it happen, when you could make the change, and how you’d monitor its impact.
The emphasis on monitoring is crucial. Job crafting is iterative. Some experiments will work better than others. Some changes will have immediate positive effects; others might take time to show results. Regular reflection helps you identify what’s working and adjust accordingly.
Second, generate multiple options before committing to any. It’s tempting to jump to the first thing that comes to mind, but better solutions often emerge when you force yourself to consider five or six possibilities.
Third, start small. Pick one or two high-priority changes rather than trying to overhaul everything simultaneously. Give yourself time to implement them and assess their impact before adding more.
Finally, build accountability into the process. Tell a trusted colleague or friend what you’re trying to do. Schedule a check-in with yourself in a month to review progress. Without accountability mechanisms, it’s too easy for good intentions to evaporate under the pressure of daily demands.
The Strength in Knowing Your Strengths
One of the most powerful forms of job crafting involves identifying and leveraging your genuine strengths—not just things you’re competent at, but activities that both energize you and showcase your abilities.
Annison provides specific exercises for identifying strengths, including reflecting on when you lose track of time at work, what achievements you’re most proud of, what you get positive feedback about, and what subjects and hobbies you enjoyed as a child. These patterns reveal your natural talents.
Once you’ve identified your top strengths, the question becomes: how can you use them more, or differently, in your current role? What do you need to do to make that happen?
The payoff is significant. As the book notes, “When we’re using our innate strengths and talents, we’re not just competent but also confident and motivated.” Work that allows you to exercise your strengths doesn’t just produce better results—it feels fundamentally different. It flows rather than grinds.
When Job Crafting Isn’t Enough
Annison is clear that job crafting isn’t always sufficient. Sometimes the fundamental mismatch between what a role requires and what you find meaningful is too large to bridge through tweaking alone.
But even if you ultimately decide to pursue a bigger change—a new role, different organization, or career shift—the job crafting process provides valuable information. It helps you identify what specifically needs to be different. It clarifies which aspects of meaningfulness matter most to you. It develops the muscle of intentionally shaping your work rather than passively accepting it.
Moreover, building a job crafting habit serves you for your entire career. Meaningfulness isn’t static. Your circumstances change, your priorities evolve, organizational contexts shift. The ability to continually adjust and optimize your role for fulfillment is a skill that compounds over time.
The Path of Least Resistance That Leads Somewhere Better
There’s something quietly revolutionary about job crafting. In a culture that often treats career dissatisfaction as grounds for dramatic reinvention, job crafting suggests a different approach: start where you are. Work with what you have. Make intentional, thoughtful adjustments before burning everything down.
This isn’t settling. It’s strategic. It recognizes that fulfillment often comes from how we engage with our circumstances, not just from what those circumstances are. It acknowledges that we often have more agency than we realize—we’ve just been waiting for permission to exercise it.
The question isn’t whether you should explore job crafting before considering bigger changes. The question is: what’s one small adjustment you could make this week that would bring your work slightly more into alignment with what matters to you?
Start there. See what happens. Then adjust and iterate.
You might be surprised by how much meaning you can create without needing to leave your job at all.