Dream jobs and reality

The Herald story starts out

If you’re dreading returning to work on Monday, don’t despair – at least you’re not alone.

A new study has found only one in four Kiwis believes they are in their dream job, a percentage lower than in most major countries.

As usual, we can ask: who did the survey, how did they do it, and what are they selling?

The numbers come from LinkedIn, the well-known spam job-search company. They say

As part of its “Dream Jobs” study, LinkedIn surveyed more than 8,000 professionals globally to find out the most common childhood career aspirations and how many professionals currently have their dream job.

So, for a start, it’s not 25% of Kiwis, it’s restricted to ‘professionals’, however they were defined. That might well explain the high satisfaction reported in India and Indonesia, where getting into the ‘professional’ classification is harder and you’d expect more professionals to be happy with their jobs.

Other news sites have different versions of the information. For example, Mashable says that LinkedIn only sampled from their members, and that only 9% world-wide were in their dream jobs, with another 21% in a career that relates to their dream job, Huffington Post concurs, and this matches the LinkedIn press release.

The 8000 respondents were spread across at least 17 countries, and there’s no indication given of how many are from New Zealand.   More importantly, there’s no indication of how they were sampled. I can’t find any evidence that the survey was done in a way that makes the sample size matter.