As the boundaries between work and life blur, we’re increasingly told that young people today want their work to not only have clear purpose and meaning, but for that meaning to chime with their personal values and desires.
Indeed, research has shown that if you can provide not only work with purpose that matches our own values, but autonomy over the work we do and the way we do it, then you strike the motivational jackpot. It should perhaps come as no surprise that this boost is even greater when we regard our work as a calling.
Research from a few years ago found that those whose work is a calling have a greater sense that their ideal self is aligned with their actual self.
“People who are able to realize their calling in the world of employment often experience a perfect fit between their interests and skills and the requirements of their job,” the researchers say. “Thus, called people often identify themselves with their work and realize their full potential while performing their work.”
Finding your calling
Whereas employee engagement stats show that large numbers of salaried employees lack this sense of calling, there is much greater evidence to suggest that participants in crowdsourcing projects have it in abundance.
One Duke University study showed that participants in crowdsourcing projects tend to contribute to those projects they’re truly passionate about, and this passion helps to fuel the intense effort required to work on a project with an inherently uncertain financial outcome.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, who recently announced the winners of the $7 million competition to find and test unmanned technologies that are capable of providing high-resolution and rapid mapping of the oceans.
It’s a competition that evokes Jules Verne’s epic stories of exploring the deep, and saw finalists from around the world descend on Kalamata, Greece, to put the devices they had spent some $52 million and three years of toil creating through their paces. The final competition required the teams to map a minimum of 250 km2 of the ocean seafloor in just 24 hours at a depth of around 4,000 meters.
Making a difference
The winning team was North Carolina based GEBCO-Nippon Foundation, who successfully completed the task. The international team are based around the Nippon Foundation/GEBCO training program in Ocean Mapping at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center of the University of New Hampshire.
They not only managed to map the required area successfully, but did so at a resolution of around 5 meters, which is significantly better than existing technologies, which tend to produce images to a resolution of around 1,000 meters. The success of the team is part of a wider project to by the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO to try and map the entire seabed by 2030.
“Currently, more than 80 percent of the world’s ocean is unmapped, and I’m proud to have worked alongside the people who will change this as a part of this XPRIZE,” said Executive Director of the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, Jyotika Virmani, Ph.D. “Our vision is that these new technologies will enable the discovery of new ocean species, underwater resources, geological features, and safer methods of exploring the deep sea, while illuminating the mysteries of the deep and discovering what has remained unknown since the dawn of time.”
Whilst the technology on display in Greece was unmistakably top notch, perhaps the most revealing aspect was the age profile of participants, with approximately 450 students contributing to the teams competing in the final.
Foremost among these were Ocean Quest, a Californian team from the Quest Institute. The team consisted largely of junior high and high school students from Valley Christian Schools, with the Quest program aiming to provide students from around the world with a STEM platform that allows them to create and engage in scientific experiments that truly change the world.
The team, who were awarded the $1 million bonus prize during the awards ceremony in Monaco recently, have documented their experience in The Ocean Quest documentary. The 48-minute documentary chronicles the experiences of the team as they competed for the XPRIZE, and has received numerous accolades at domestic and international film festivals.
Providing a leg up
This kind of exposure to real-world projects can be crucial not only to provide young people with an outlet for their passions, but in overcoming social mobility hurdles that seem to grow with each passing year. A recent study by New York University highlights the worsening social mobility in the United States, with the occupational status of American workers reflecting that of their parents far more than believed.
The data shows the the sons and daughters of high-status parents have many more advantages in the labor market than previous work believed. For instance, roughly 50% of children of workers in top tier occupations now work in occupations of a similar stature. Alternatively, half of the children of parents in bottom tier work also work in occupations of a similar stature.
Recent research from the University of Bath highlights clearly the impact work experience, such as that provided by he Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, can have in effectively breaking this cycle.
Suffice to say, the aim of the XPRIZE is a purely scientific one, but if it can also encourage more young people to take an interest in STEM subjects, and to transfer that interest into a viable career, then that is no bad outcome either.
