America's Happiest Careers are Not About The Money

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41890356/ns/business-careers/
I recently read a article about a survey that was conducted revealing America's top ten happiest careers based on a variety of different questions that were asked to over 200,000 independent employee reviews from over 70,000 jobs all over the country to collect 1.6 million data points on nine different factors of workplace happiness.These included the employee's relationship with their boss and co-workers, their work environment, job resources, compensation, growth opportunities, company culture, company reputation, daily tasks and job control over the work that they do on a daily basis. These numbers were collected and averaged out to come up with a employee happiness rating for each job site. The results were very clear that even in tough economic times like were are in today happiness on the job does not just come from a big paycheck or even up there in the top three of what people find to make them happy while working. The top three things employees are looking for on the job are....

1.The specific tasks a job entails on a day-to-day basis.
2.How much control the employee has over his or her daily tasks.
3.Relationships with co-workers and customers, including supervisors and colleagues.

How much money a job offers obviously is a important factor when deciding on a job but it is clear that even with a big paycheck it is not enough to consistently satisfy workers. Careers in biotechnology were ranked number one followed by customer services and education employees. "In biotech, the people that they work with, and more specifically the person that they work for, tends to rank higher in terms of importance, and employees are overwhelmingly happy with those conditions," says Heidi Golledge the CEO of CareerBliss. Biotechnology offers a lot of control over what they do while on the job which is also an important factor. I was pretty surprised with customer service being number 2 on the list as the happiest jobs. To me that line of work tends to be more stressful and doesn't pay that well but being able to talk to people everyday and valuing co workers more then other industries led to that ranking.  Education was another occupation that  caught me off guard in contrast to biotech in education employee boss relationships were not important. Teachers value the work they do, the way they work, and the people they were with. The final 7 jobs that closed out the top ten were  administrative, purchasing, accounting, finance, nonprofit, health care and law. A lot of these types of jobs surprised me a lot because i thought most of these were high stress low paying jobs, but i guess that shows to prove that money isn't the only thing people look for in a job. What are your most important factors when looking for a job? Is money on the top of the list?