Introduction to Job Crafting

Overview

On this page, we will discuss:

What Is Job Crafting?

A small wooden shed with a sunflower painted on it, together with handwritten text "Always Room to Grow"

Throughout this module, we discuss the benefits of aligning operational needs to meet your professional development goals.

Job crafting is one tool to support this process.

Many organizations have already incorporated training and opportunities for job crafting into their personnel policies (although not always in ways that build and support broader workplace innovation capability) as one example of combining improvements in organizational performance with improvements in employee quality of work life.

Job crafting refers to the act of changing one's job in a personalized way, with an intention of improving performance for the organization and the quality of your work life.

Definition of Job Crafting

Tims and Bakker (2010, p. 2) define job crafting as "an employee-initiated approach which enables employees to shape their own work environment such that it fits their individual needs by adjusting the prevailing job demands and resources." 

Planned Happenstance

The process of job crafting is an expansion of developing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) goals related to your learning objectives for your role. Identifying your learning goals and setting professional development goals for your role likely affected the scope of your work.

These efforts are a form of Planned Happenstance.

"The situations in which individuals find themselves are partly a function of factors over which they have no control and partly a function of actions that the individuals have initiated themselves"​ (Krumboltz, 2009, p. 136).

You may not have had complete control over which role you landed for your work term, but you can proactively take steps to shape your role to meet your professional development goals while supporting your organization and its capacity for innovation. This is the essence of job crafting.

The importance of job crafting for workplace innovation lies in the fact that "as employees craft their own jobs, they create scope to be more innovative at work (e.g., incorporating work tasks that will prompt innovative thoughts; crafting relationships with colleagues who can champion innovative ideas; focusing on skills that can be applied to a creative outlook on new products and processes in the organization; and adopting a view of one's work role that will spur the engagement in innovation for the organization, overall)" (Bindl, Unsworth, Gibson, & Stride, 2019, p. 609).

Considerations for Job Crafting

As psychologist and MBA Catherine Moore has discussed in the article, What Is Job Crafting? Links to an external site., there are some potential considerations to job crafting that are important to keep in mind.

At the organizational level, employees may perceive that their roles provide "unequal access" to job crafting opportunities. Even for those employees who wish to actively engage in job crafting, their individual goals may be misaligned with those of the organization. That is why it is important to identify those areas of overlap between your goals and organizational needs.

Venn diagram. Left side is "organizational needs". Right side is "employee professional development goals." The middle part where they overlap is "opportunity for job crafting".

Preventing Burnout

On an individual level, there is the possibility that an employee may be "taking on too much" when job crafting new tasks and projects. It's important to consider your overall well-being as you balance your own professional development with doing work that may be beyond the scope of your role.

In your future career, as you develop new skills and perform duties outside of your job description, opportunities to negotiate salary raises or take on a new role in a different unit or organization can emerge (Moore, 2019).

However, job crafting can also help prevent burnout. Refer to the article, The Role of Off-Job Crafting in Burnout Prevention during COVID-19 Crisis Links to an external site., for a longitudinal review of how job crafting supported the prevention of burnout during COVID.

Managing Your Expectations

As job crafting involves altering the responsibilities of your work, you can only engage in this process when organizational leadership is supportive of employee-led improvements. As such, actively crafting your role should always begin in dialogue with your manager.

In the Job Crafting and Your Work Term section, we will explore ways to have these conversations with your supervisor and other tips for approaching job crafting during your work term. The scope of your influence as a co-op student will inevitably be narrower compared to the scope of influence in future permanent roles as there is already an expectation of significant learning and growth within your role as a co-op student.

Significant changes to the scope of your work won't necessarily be the outcome of these conversations with your supervisor; the purpose of considering job crafting in your work term is to help align your work with your professional development goals wherever possible, even if in small ways. Job crafting offers you some specific tools and perspective to achieve this beyond what you may have explored in setting SMART goals at the start of your previous work term.

Icon: yellow lightbulb Reflection

Think back to a previous experience with work, internships, or volunteering. What were the organizational needs and what were your professional development goals? Was there an overlap? If an overlap existed, did you take an opportunity to job craft? If yes, how did you do it? If not, why so? If there was no overlap, was there potential for you to shift or adjust your professional development goals?

icon: Industry Insight (two people talking)  Industry Insight

"Be up to date with the latest industry trends, technologies, and practices. This will show that you are passionate about your work and are committed to your professional development."

Arsh Khan, Senior Project Lead
Master in Global Affairs, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

References

Bindl, U. K., Unsworth, K. L., Gibson, C. B., & Stride, C. B. (2019). Job crafting revisited: Implications of an extended framework for active changes at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(5), 605-628. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-56493-001.pdf Links to an external site.

Krumboltz, J. (2009). The happenstance learning theory. Journal of Career Assessment, 17(2), 135-154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072708328861 Links to an external site.

Moore, C. (2019, May 17). What is job crafting? (Incl. 5 examples and exercises). Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/job-crafting/ Links to an external site.

Pijpker, R., Kersieck, P., Tušl, M., de Bloom, J., Brauchli, R., & Bauer, G. F. (2022). The role of off-job crafting in burnout prevention during COVID-19 crisis: A longitudinal study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(4), 2146. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8872592/ Links to an external site. 

Tims, M., & Bakker, A. B. (2010). Job crafting: Towards a new model of individual job redesign. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 36(2), 1-9 https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/EJC89228 Links to an external site.