Predicting IT Job Satisfaction: Occupational Congruence and the Job Characteristics Model

The IT industry struggles to attract qualified talent despite an exceptional job outlook in terms of both availability and compensation. Similarly, post-secondary academic institutions struggle to recruit students for IT majors. One potential issue is that current career counseling methods do not adequately convey relevant job characteristic data to prospective job applicants and academic majors. We report the results of a pilot study surveying 72 IT professionals regarding their job interests and perceptions of important characteristics of their current job. We test the ability of Holland's classic job interest congruence model, an alternate congruence model based on professionals' job perceptions, and the Job Characteristics Model of Work Motivation (JCM) to determine which is more effective at predicting desired job outcomes. Results show that a sub-set of JCM constructs including task variety, task identity, and task autonomy is superior to congruence models in predicting positive job outcomes.