What makes a job better? Survey evidence from job changers

We use a large, nationally representative survey (SHED) to show that job changes lead to improvements in job characteristics beyond pay and benefits. Focusing on pay and benefits alone leads to incorrect predictions about job changes 30 percent of the time, as workers use more than pay and benefits to evaluate job quality. The most predictive characteristic of self-reported job quality is interest in the work. The results of this article suggest that parents, in particular mothers, weigh work–life balance more heavily in assessing whether their new job is better than do nonparents. Pay and benefits changes are less predictive of overall self-reported job quality changes for older workers compared with younger workers, with interest in the work being more predictive for older workers.

We also show large differences in the correlations between different job characteristics by worker education level. Changes in job characteristics are more positively correlated for workers with a high school degree or less compared with those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The differences in correlations suggest that using only one characteristic, like pay and benefits, to assess job quality understates differences in overall job quality by more for less educated workers, relative to those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The results improve understanding of differences in workers’ pay, which are imperfect proxies for job quality. Workers’ emphasis on factors like their interest in the work, holding pay fixed, helps to explain the large amount of effort that businesses devote to their culture beyond strict productivity enhancements. The results in this article also validate previous research focusing on moving workers without bachelor’s degrees into higher-paying jobs, since those jobs tend to also come with other, better characteristics.