You cannot tell how satisfied people will be with a job simply by looking at the job itself. Research shows that job satisfaction is only slightly related to the status of jobs, their educational requirements, and their other characteristics. These are very low correlations, but they have very important implications. The correlations also suggest that people who do the same jobs may differ greatly in their levels of satisfaction. One possibility is that job satisfaction simply reflects a person's overall outlook on life.
Some people are easily satisfied, others are never satisfied.
A person's disposition may be more important for her job satisfaction than the job she actually holds. A more likely possibility, however, is that people evaluate their jobs by comparing them with the jobs of their friends, not by comparing them with some hypothetical national norm. Laborers compare themselves to other laborers, executives compare themselves to other executives, and a laborer may therefore be as satisfied with his job as an executive is with his. In fact, vocational graduates may be happier with their jobs than other graduates are with theirs. A cynical explanation is that placement in a vocational track lowers the aspirations of young people so that vocational graduates are satisfied with less.