Here's a good place to start. We worked with CareerBliss, an online jobs database, to find the jobs with the happiest employees in America. To come up with the ranking, CareerBliss examined 57,000 employee evaluations across more than 450 different job titles.
The final measure of job satisfaction, which CareerBliss calls a "bliss score," is given on a scale of one to five (one being the least happy and five the most). The bliss scores are based on eight factors: work-life balance; relationship with coworkers; work environment; job resources; compensation; growth opportunities; company culture; and daily tasks.
Overall, among the positions that ranked as the happiest in the nation, employees rate their bosses and colleagues as the best part of their jobs. They also give high marks to job freedom, which generally refers to the amount of flexibility employees have in how, when, and where they get their work done. Concrete factors like human resources and compensation get more lukewarm reviews.
The jobs aren't necessarily what you'd expect, and they're certainly not the highest paying. But for one reason or another, employees love them anyway.