(This blog was originally posted on the Substack of CEO & Founder, Makena Christine)
That ‘stuck’ feeling, the one where your career feels off, but you can’t quite say why, usually shows up when your career values aren’t being met. Here’s the thing about career values: they aren’t static. They change as we do. The beautiful thing about being human: we are constantly evolving, and therefore our careers should too.
When I started my full-time career at 22, all I wanted was to learn and be challenged — that was my core value. Close behind it was ‘Projects’: having genuinely interesting work to sink my teeth into. And right alongside those two was ‘Team’ — I wanted to be inspired by the people around me, especially my direct manager.
For the better part of almost four years, those values were being fulfilled. But going into my fifth year, I began to feel a shift. What I valued most in a career was evolving because I was. ‘Mission & Impact’ and ‘Career Growth’ were becoming increasingly important. Regarding ‘Mission & Impact,’ I felt a desire to pour my effort into one thing I deeply cared about and wanted deep expertise in. (No longer did I want to bounce between projects every few months, which while great from a ‘Learning’ POV, is less so from an ‘Impact’ POV). I also realized ‘Career Growth’ mattered to me, and that I wasn’t getting it in my current work environment. There was no clear path forward, and even if there had been, I was beginning to see that I probably didn’t want that path to be in the corporate consulting world at all.
If you’re feeling stuck in your career and unsure whether it’s time to pivot: look at the list of values below and ask whether your current role actually fulfills them. If it doesn’t, is there a way to make that happen where you are? If not, it’s likely time to go.
Take a minute and identify your top 1–3 values from the list below. Try to rank them if you can. I’ve grouped the values into buckets, which is useful in its own right because it can show you which categories matter most to you, not just which individual items.
Development & Growth
How you grow
- Career Growth — potential for advancement, skill development, and upward mobility
- Learning & Training — access to education, workshops, and programs that build your expertise
- Craft & Mastery — the pursuit of excellence, attention to detail, and pride in the quality of your output
- Leadership — opportunities for mentorship and shaping an organization’s direction
- Projects — the nature, variety, and scope of your work
- Innovation & Creativity — a focus on new ideas, experimentation, and original problem-solving
Compensation & Security
What you tangibly get
- Compensation Packages — base salary, bonuses, and equity
- Rewards & Recognition — acknowledgment for your contributions and achievements
- Health Coverage — quality of medical, dental, and wellness benefits
- Stability & Security — confidence in the company’s staying power and your job’s safety
- Perks — extras like company events or office amenities
Culture & Environment
What you stand for
- Organization Culture — the shared values and behaviors that define the workplace
- Work Environment — the physical or digital setting you work in day to day
- Diversity & Inclusion — commitment to an equitable, respectful workplace
- Social Responsibility — ethics, sustainability, and community commitment
- Mission & Impact — how well your work aligns with a purpose that matters to you
- Passion — how much genuine excitement you feel for the work itself
Team & Collaboration
Who you work with
- Team Members — the quality of your day-to-day collaboration and support
- Direct Management — feedback, communication, and support from your manager
- Networking Opportunities — access to professional connections and community
- Global Exposure — chances to work internationally or across cultures
Work Structure & Logistics
How & where you work
- Autonomy — freedom to manage your own tasks and decisions
- Remote Flexibility — control over where and how you work
- Work-Life Balance — a healthy boundary between work and everything else
- Tools & Technology — the quality of what you use to actually do your job
- Location — the office’s physical site or the role’s geographic reach
Your values act as a compass — a clear way to identify what matters to you most in your career, and check whether you have it, are headed in the right direction, or need to pivot. This isn’t about auditing what mattered to you five years ago, or what you think should matter — it’s about being honest with yourself about what matters to you the most right now. Because like I said, values change. Should I choose to have kids one day, I imagine work-life balance will climb straight to the top of my list. For a lot of people right now — Gen Z especially, and women in particular — travel and remote flexibility have become top values. In 2025, 40% — yes, nearly HALF — of women aged 15 to 44 said they’d move abroad permanently if given the chance. This is four times — 4X! — the 10% who said the same in 2014 (Gallup). For solopreneurs, who make up one-third of the U.S. workforce (McKinsey) — ‘Autonomy’ is the top value that likely drove them to that type of work.
Checking in on your values is a fast, direct way to ask yourself: is this still the right stop on my career journey? Careers aren’t linear, they are lifelong journeys made up of multiple stops, so it’s important to check in with yourself and see whether it’s time to move on to the next one.
We’ve all been told that the career holy grail is to “do what you love.” But that well-intentioned advice misses a crucial nuance: you can love your work and still go home feeling unfulfilled.
The better question isn’t, “Do I love this?” but rather, “Does this align with my values?”
That is the true holy grail. Fulfillment isn’t found in chasing a fleeting feeling; it’s found in the steady alignment between your daily work and what you value most.
How oyster fits in
On oyster, an app that helps you find organizations and people aligned to all that you do (side ventures included), we don’t just ask where you worked — we ask what you liked while you were there, encouraging you to select from a drop-down featuring the same values from the list above. Unlike LinkedIn, we’re aiming to go beyond job title and company logo.
Why? Because imagine filtering for organizations by what you actually value — work-life balance, compensation, impact, etc. Value data like this — at scale, from people who actually worked there — is hard to find on glossy career pages, and Glassdoor feedback is often too polarizing to be useful.
We enable you to pick one value, pick five, or pick none — the field’s optional (and made to be open to interpretation). It’s also impossible to “bash” when you’re selecting from a pre-determined drop-down list. What we’re aiming to do is build something bigger than any single qualitative review can capture: a living, quantitative pulse on what each organization is actually like to be part of.
And who knows, that value data might do more than help you find your next fit — it might nudge organizations to look inward too. If “Culture” isn’t showing up as an “attribute most liked” at a certain company, well... maybe that’s a conversation worth having up in C-Suite.
So, two action items for you:
- What are your top career values? How have they changed or not changed over the past 5 years? (comment below!)
- Join oyster to find the organizations that actually fit what you value.
