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Employers seeking to attract and retain talent with the promise of meaningful work need to realise how much this concept is prone to change over time, a talent specialist says.

In her book Meaningful Work, recruitment specialist and Beaumont People MD Nina Mapson Bone says that when her organisation commissioned a review of research into what makes work meaningful for people, it identified a lack of clarity around how to define "meaningful work", and an underlying assumption that the various factors that make work more or less meaningful for an individual won't change over the course of their career.

"It was through this research that we came up with a definition of meaningful work [as] the importance an individual places on their work meeting their current personal beliefs, values, goals, expectations, and purpose in the context of their social and cultural environment..."