Money (Doesn't) Matter

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Ask any high schooler researching careers and you can be sure that salary will be one of their top three factors in choosing a career - not environment, growth opportunities, or daily tasks. Yet this article shows that factors like these are what truly determines happiness. Infact, most of the careers that ranked highest on the happiness scale were low-paying jobs.

Here's the top 5 from the list compiled by Forbes from the CareerBliss survey along with the reason they love what they do:

1. Biotechnology (coworkers, who they work for)
2. Customer Service (control over daily tasks, ability to interact with people)
3. Education (daily tasks, ex.working with children)
4. Clerical Workers (daily tasks, job demand)
5. Purchasing (daily tasks)

Health Care and Legal, some of the highest-paying careers, ranked 9 and 10 on this list. This survey definitely proves that money does NOT matter when evaluating employee happiness. According to the survey's results, money did not even factor into the top three reasons employees were happy. Here are the top three reasons:
*the specific tasks a job entails on a day-to-day basis
*how much control the employee has over his or her daily tasks
*relationships with co-workers and customers, including supervisors and colleagues

Therefore, our society definitely has skewed priorities when determing career choices solely based on salary. In the end, money has almost nothing to do with how happy someone is in their career. Once basic needs are met, extra money is seen as a perk but not a necessity. Rather, the environment one works in and who one works with are the real determining factors in happiness calculations.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41890356/ns/business-careers/t/americas-happiest-careers-its-not-about-money/

Authority: This article is from NBCNews, and it cites Forbes.com
Accuracy: The article cites a survey conducted by job site CareerBliss.com that surveyed over 200,000 employees in varied fields of work on nine factors of workplace happiness.
Timeliness: This article is from 2011.