Confessions of a Job Crafter: How We Can Increase the Passion Within and the Impact of Our Profession

Abstract

Job crafting, engaging in practices that alter our jobs for the better, has enormous potential to enliven scholars and to enhance our field’s societal impact. Drawing upon a personal tale, I outline various job crafting techniques in which I have engaged and note how these practices have transformed the level of satisfaction I feel for my job, profession, and life, while also enriching the quality of my research and teaching contributions. As profoundly positive as has been my experience with job crafting, I have also encountered some significant systemic obstacles. For the tenured, such obstacles would likely be frustrating, constraining passion and undermining contributions. For the untenured, many become pitfalls that can endanger careers. I address some of the obstacles that I encountered while engaging in job crafting practices, framing them in terms of what we can do to remove them. I am optimistic that, collectively, we can dramatically diminish and even abolish the obstacles outlined here for the benefit of scholars, the field, and society.