By Jane Wundersitz, founder of WunderTraining and Australia’s only VIA Character Strengths Master Trainer. Findings drawn from an original analysis of 6,296 adult VIA Character Strengths profiles collected through WunderTraining programs across Australian workplaces between 2019 and 2026.
Every few years, Australia has a national conversation about aged care. It is usually a conversation about what is going wrong: funding, staffing, systems under strain. The people inside the sector rarely get measured for anything except what they lack.
So here is a different measurement.
When I analysed 6,296 VIA Character Strengths profiles from Australian workplaces, one of the largest single-instrument practitioner databases of its kind in this country, one sector stood apart on the strengths that matter most to human care. It wasn’t close.
Across the national database, Kindness is a signature strength (a top-five strength) for 53% of Australian workers. That already makes it one of the most common strengths in the country.
In aged care, it is 63%.
Nearly two in three aged care workers carry Kindness among the five strengths most core to who they are. No other sector in the database comes close. And the pattern doesn’t stop there:
Here is the result I find most remarkable. Zest, the strength of energy and vitality, is the rarest signature strength in Australia. Just 3 people in 100 carry it in their top five nationally.
The sector where Zest runs highest? Aged care.
Sit with that. The workforce doing some of the most emotionally demanding work in the country, the work we associate with fatigue, burnout and a system under pressure, reports the most vitality of any sector in the database. Heart and energy, concentrated in the workforce that needs both most.
These profiles weren’t shaped by aged care. Character strengths are relatively stable patterns of identity. The sector didn’t manufacture kindness in these workers; they brought it with them. What this data shows is self-selection at scale. The people who choose care work are, measurably, the people built for it.
That reframes the workforce conversation. Australia doesn’t have a compassion shortage in aged care. It has an extraordinary concentration of exactly the right strengths (Kindness, Love, Social Intelligence, Creativity, and rare vitality) working inside systems that were not designed around them.
1. Name what your people already are. The most abundant strengths in your workforce are almost certainly the least mentioned in your position descriptions, your performance frameworks, and your recognition. Strengths that go unnamed go underused, and unrecognised strengths are an engagement cost you’re paying every day.
2. Protect the vitality. It’s rarer than you think. That elevated Zest is a sector treasure and a leadership responsibility. Energy this rare, doing work this demanding, deserves deliberate protection: workload design, recovery rhythms, and leaders who treat vitality as an asset to be safeguarded rather than a resource to be spent.
3. Recruit for what the data says works. If the people thriving in care work lead with Kindness, Love and Social Intelligence, that is a selection signal hiding in plain sight. It offers a strengths-informed lens for attraction and retention in a sector that needs both.
Australia claps for its care workers and then measures them by their gaps. The data tells a different story. The kindest, most emotionally intelligent, most quietly energetic workforce in the country is already on shift, right now, in aged care.
It’s time the sector’s story was told from its strengths.
This analysis is based on 6,296 unique adult profiles completed on the current VIA survey (VIA-IS-P) through WunderTraining workshops and programs in Australian organisations between approximately 2019 and July 2026, spanning nine sectors including aged care. [PLACEHOLDER: insert aged care sample size, e.g. “The aged care cohort comprises N profiles.”] Signature strength figures refer to the percentage of people ranking a strength in their personal top five. Organisations were classified by the workforce trained, using documented decision rules. As a practitioner database drawn from organisations investing in team development, it describes the developing Australian workforce rather than a national random sample.
Jane Wundersitz is the founder of WunderTraining, Australia’s only VIA Character Strengths Master Trainer, and a 2026 Real Leaders Top Impact Speaker. She has delivered leadership and team development to more than 60,000 people across Australia, including extensive work in the aged care sector. Her forthcoming book on culture, connection and character strengths draws on this research. For keynotes, workshops or media enquiries, contact WunderTraining.
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Jane Wundersitz
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