Work consumes around a third of our waking hours during the weekday. Yet, according to Gallup, nearly a third of employees are disengaged.
80,000 Hours, a London-based nonprofit that helps people find the best career fit for themselves, reviewed 60 studies on dream jobs and found that a dream job meets six criteria: it’s engaging, it helps others, you’re good at it, you work with supportive colleagues, it doesn’t have major negatives, and it fits with the rest of your life.
Dream jobs seem difficult to land—one 2024 survey of 3,000 employees across the U.S. finds only 14% of American adults are working their dream job. The same study found that 38% of adults hate their job, and 66% would be willing to switch careers to chase their dream job. And at a time when the labor market is shedding jobs of all sorts, a dream job may seem like a chimera.
And yet? There are people who pull it off.
Fast Company talked with four workers who have the gig of their dreams. While some of them knew exactly what they wanted and went to school for it . . . others had no idea their dream job even existed, or navigated countless twists and turns. One interviewee spent a period of time homeless; another is busy building up other paths just in case it turns out her dream job, well, stops being the dream.
How do you fashion the job of your dreams? We first asked this question back in 2007—and while industries and culture have changed, workers’ desire to do something meaningful to them has not.
Nathalie Pereira: pilot
What she does: Pereira is a first officer for United Airlines, where she flies a Boeing 777. She’s based out of New Jersey and makes long-haul international flights.
Her career path: “I fell in love with flying when I was five and visiting Brazil,” says Pereira, who has Brazilian heritage. “Ever since, I wanted to be in the skies.” After high school, she attended flight school and worked as a pilot at a regional airport for five years, three as a captain. In 2021, she joined United’s Aviate program, a career development initiative started by United Airlines to find and develop pilots. Aviate offers candidates mentorship and guarantees them a job at United after completing the program and meeting hiring requirements. Pereira became a first officer for United in 2022.
A day in the life: Pereira says she thrives on spontaneity. On a regular day, she’ll go through her morning routine of gym and coffee, and then look over her flight plan on the company iPad, which has information on everything from the weather on her route to plane maintenance status. Then she’ll go to the airport where she does a briefing with the other pilots on her crew. After the briefing, they’ll do a walkthrough of the plane to ensure everything works. Once Pereira touches down, she’ll meet up with her crew, grab a bite to eat, and explore the city. Some of her favorite stops include Tokyo, Brussels, and Barcelona.
Her advice: “Being a pilot is highly feasible—there are a lot of resources,” she says. “If the cost of flight school is holding you back, just do it. You’ll make it back.” She points out there are also tons of scholarships available through organizations such as the Latino Pilots Association and Women in Aviation International. In addition, United’s Aviate Academy is designed to take candidates from their first flight to a job at United.
While women only account for 11% of the pilots in America, Pereira wants other women to know that shouldn’t be a barrier. “Aviation has traditionally had fewer women in pilot roles, but access to the profession is based on meeting the same training, performance, and regulatory standards for all. Success comes from skill development, discipline, and experience. I never let gender deter me from pursuing what I love,” she says.
Elizabeth Casper: personal stylist
What she does: Casper works with clients at Stitch Fix to offer tips on styling. She’s also on Stitch Fix’s content creation team and helps make merchandise videos with fashion advice.
Her career path: Casper comes from a family with fashion roots. Her family owns a bridal shop and her grandfather had a degree in pattern design. Casper ended up pursuing a degree in musical theatre and was at an audition when she saw a friend working remotely for Stitch Fix. “It blew my mind that you can be a stylist. That became the dream,” she says. “I didn’t know being a stylist was a thing. I assumed I’d need to learn to sew and become a designer, but what I really loved was the curation of outfits.” Casper monitored the Stitch Fix website for jobs and landed one in 2021.
A day in the life: Casper starts the day by checking if she has any messages from clients, answering questions and helping them put together outfits. In the middle of the day, she’ll take a break to work on filming some content, and then she’ll wrap the day by styling more clients. “I’m always trying to delve into personal experience—what’s something that you’ve worn recently that made you feel good? What’s a color that makes you feel like you glow? Is there anything coming up on your calendar? How can I help make that easier?”
Her advice: “Pursue the things that you love and allow all of the avenues that are open to you to teach you something to take forward,” Casper says, pointing out that her own career has been full of zigs and zags. “Style your friends, style yourself. Learn what fabrics feel like so you can take all of that knowledge into the next phase. Put your creativity and your art out there.”
Melissa Lewis Gentry (MLG): video game designer
What they do: MLG is a game designer for Demiurge Studios, which does code development for larger studios like Blizzard and Epic. “A game designer is analogous to a product designer,” MLG says. “I’m often the person who solves whatever problem comes up, whether it’s technical design, or gameplay programming.”
Their career path: “I loved games as a kid and was definitely a Dungeons & Dragons nerd when I went to college. My dad was a programmer, so I grew up building my own computers. But when I got to college, I flunked that class,” MLG said. “A lot of it had to do with ADHD and not being diagnosed as a young woman in the early 2000s. Instead, I put down the idea of working in video games until the pandemic.”
MLG’s path to video game design is long and winding and includes a stint working in a call center, taking a 50% pay cut to manage a comic and board game store which folded, working in sales and marketing at a board game company which also folded, and then trying to run a board game café that opened during the first month of the pandemic. When the board game cafe shut down, MLG became homeless.
While MLG was crashing on a friend’s couch applying for jobs, they were invited to join a game jam (the equivalent of a hackathon). At the game jam, MLG started programming again and fell in love. They took online courses in programming and started searching for jobs in the video game industry.
Ultimately they landed an internship at Demiurge Studios in 2021 for candidates with nontraditional experience who would otherwise be overlooked. Shortly after, they were promoted to full-time and still work there today.
A day in the life: As a video game designer, you “have in your heart the perfect experience you want to give a player,” but then you have to marry it to time and budget. On a given day, MLG might be brainstorming ideas for a game with themes and characters and then narrowing these down. MLG also spends a lot of time problem-solving: “Every morning I look in [project management tool] Jira to see what tickets I have.” For example, if the designers want players to click a button to get a reward and the engineers say ‘we can’t do that,’ “‘it’s my job to say ‘what if we do this instead’?”
Their advice: “No amount of education will give you the résumé experience of having shipped a game, and the best way to do this is make a game on your own and ship it. The video game industry has been seriously hit during the past two years and it’s brutally hard to find a job, but nothing is preventing you from making a game.”
Zinia Lee Fengel: influencer
What she does: Lee Fengel, who goes by Zinia Lee, has been a fashion influencer on Instagram for the past five years and has over 115,000 followers on Instagram. For many members of Gen Z, Lee’s path is the dream. However, given that, Lee is still in her early twenties and unsure of what she’ll want in the future. So she’s carving out other career options: She’s also a full-time student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and a public relations intern at Retrofête, a New York fashion label; influencers commonly have day jobs or additional side hustles, especially Gen Z.
Her career path: Lee posted her first video during the pandemic when she was 16. “I love putting together cool outfits and wanted to share them,” she said. Within the first year, she started getting invites from brands. At first, they offered her free merchandise in return for a post. However, gradually this turned into paid deals. This summer, Lee got a manager and started landing four-figure brand deals. While influencing could be a full-time job for her, she chooses to work with brands that represent her values—for example, she only works with cruelty-free makeup brands, and only wears leather if it’s secondhand.
A day in the life: Since Lee is juggling classes and an internship, she fits content creation where she can. “I have certain times of the day blocked off and I multitask,” she said, “I like going to the gym and being active, so I’ll set the treadmill to an incline walk and edit. I have CapCut Pro on my iPhone so I’ll also edit during my commute.” Lee keeps a Notion, an AI workspace, full of video ideas, as well as a timeline for what’s publishing when, and batches filming. “If I do my hair and have my makeup on, I’m gonna film five videos,” she said. Going forward, Lee doesn’t know if she’ll keep influencing, despite it already being a dream income stream for much of her age group. “I want to go wherever it takes me,” she said. “But I know it’s very easy to resent something you love.”
Her advice: Lee notes that success is not linear. Sometimes a video you put two seconds into goes viral. Other times a video that you agonized over tanks. Instead, she said, the key is consistency. “A lot of people think, if I have one really good video idea it’ll go viral and then I’m set . . . I try to post every other day, so I’m constantly filming, editing, and producing.” However, she said the first step is easy: “Post a video. It really is that simple.”