• Question: Would you change jobs for more money in a whole other industry or stay at your current job?

    Asked by back520pang on 2 Jul 2025.
    • Photo: Charlotte Slade

      Charlotte Slade answered on 2 Jul 2025:


      That is a really thoughtful question. It’s easy to think that more money automatically equals more happiness, but it’s often more complicated than that.

      For me, I would choose to stay right where I am.

      Think about baking your favourite cake. You need certain ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs. Let’s say money is the sugar. You definitely need sugar to make the cake taste good! But a cake made of only sugar would be pretty awful. You also need the other ingredients that give it substance and flavour.

      In my job, those other “ingredients” are things like:

      Curiosity: I get paid to ask “what if?” and then try to find the answer.
      Problem-Solving: It’s like getting a new puzzle to solve every single day.
      Impact: Knowing my work could one day help people or our planet.
      Learning: I am constantly learning new things, so my brain never gets bored.

      My current career has a great mix of all those ingredients. A different job might offer me a whole lorry-load of “sugar” (money), but if it’s missing the other things I love, I don’t think I’d be very happy in the long run. I’d rather have my perfectly balanced (and delicious!) career cake.

    • Photo: Oleg Kozhura

      Oleg Kozhura answered on 4 Jul 2025:


      Good question! The cake analogy Charlotte made is very on-point & it’s hard to give a better answer! πŸ˜€ Personally, I wouldn’t switch careers for more money. Don’t get me wrong, money is important and getting paid fairly for your work is a must, but I’m getting a lot of satisfaction from knowing that what I do matters on a scale bigger than oneself. The work we do is important for the themes of air pollution & climate change, and knowing that it has the potential to benefit the whole world is a great motivator that’s hard to beat!

    • Photo: Robbie Lynch

      Robbie Lynch answered on 16 Jul 2025:


      If I felt that I could do the new job as well as I do my current one then yes. A lot goes into deciding whether to move jobs but its also important to have the skills required.

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