Your 2021 career kick-start

While we’re not promising you’ll ever be thrilled to receive yet another interminably dull email from Trevor in IT, you can maximise what is good about your job and delay your desire to move on – maybe even permanently. Besides, having a positive relationship with your job is arguably more important now than it’s ever been.

“With more of us working from home, it’s easy for stresses or issues around work to spill out into our personal spaces,” says Samantha Clarke, happiness consultant, lecturer at The School Of Life and author of

Love It Or Leave It: How To Be Happy At Work. “And if your job requires you to be at a specific location, simply going to work carries more risk than before.”

But Instagram perfection and the very unrealistic expectation to love every single task – and every damn day – can make us feel dissatisfied and restless in jobs that are, actually, pretty good.

“You will never get 100% of what you need from your job, in the same way you can’t get everything you need from one person,” advises Clarke. But what you can do is follow her advice on optimising the job you have…

But, let’s face it, thanks (or should that be no thanks) to the pesky pandemic, you might not be having loads of luck job hunting at the moment.