Both faculty and students can feel overwhelmed with the constant stream of demands on our time and energy. It’s easy in these instances to feel like our work is happening to us, rather than for us. But what if there was a way to better align our daily work with our passions without changing careers? Job crafting is one evidence-based practice aimed at changing the meaning of one’s work. This strategy includes proactive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Three categories of job crafting include task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting. Research has demonstrated positive associations between job crafting and work engagement, job satisfaction, meaningfulness, well-being, and job performance (Zhang & Parker, 2019). As faculty, we can apply these strategies to our own daily work, as well as introduce these concepts to our students.

How to Job Craft

Task Crafting

Task Crafting involves changing the number, scope, or type of job tasks. Examples might include:

• Choose a class session or activity to update with information about a current related research interest, which directly brings your professional expertise to students’ learning experience.
• Update an existing course assignment or introduce a new one that aligns with a current interest related to the course topic. 
• Taking a new approach to grading, such as having students review their own and each other’s work first or considering alternative grading approaches.

Relational Crafting

Relational Crafting includes changing the quality or quantity of interactions with others at work. Examples include:

• Offer to swap guest lectures with a colleague as a means of connecting over related course content and sharing each other’s expertise with students.
• Invite a colleague to be a ‘grading buddy.’ You can get together in person or virtually and work alongside one another to get through piles of grading. 
• Encourage students to attend your office hours by relabeling them ‘student hours’ or ‘coffee chats.’  

Cognitive Crafting

Cognitive Crafting involves changing how we think about the work we do. Examples include:

• Reframe thinking of grading not as a pile of work that must be completed, but as another opportunity to provide developmental feedback to students. 
• Reconsider service obligations as a means of influencing change at the university and providing your expertise to important stakeholders. 

Crafting in the Classroom

Our students are entering a rapidly changing and dynamic job market, and will also benefit from practicing job crafting strategies. We can invite students to craft their experience of our courses in a number of ways.

For example:

• Task Crafting: Offer students options for how they complete an assignment to demonstrate mastery (e.g., an essay, presentation, or infographic). Alternatively, let students choose their own topic for a particular assignment.

• Relational Crafting: Ask students to form discussion groups based on shared majors or career interests, or consider asking students to regularly change who they interact with in discussion groups by moving around the room.

• Cognitive Crafting: Early in the semester, ask students to consider one key takeaway they want to gain from the course that isn’t explicitly stated on the syllabus (e.g., working in a team, presentation skills) and identify a plan for crafting their participation toward that goal.

References and Resources

Demsky, C. A. (2026, January 13). Reclaiming the joy of teaching: Crafting our roles as educators. CETL Workshop.
Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2020, March 12). What job crafting looks like. Harvard Business Review.
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26, 179-201.
Zhang, F., & Parker, S. K. (2019). Reorienting job crafting research: A hierarchical structure of job crafting concepts and integrative review. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 126-146.

About the Author

Caitlin Demsky, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Management in the Department of Management & Marketing. She teaches courses on organizational behavior, human resource management, and work and stress. Her research focuses on employees’ stress and well-being and the work-nonwork interface. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her two young sons and taking time for her embroidery and pottery hobbies.

Photo by Nathan Dumla on Unsplash. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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