A tricky question, right? Yet I always find it curious when folks have a constraint to describe a thing in the shortest way possible. It can be easy to digest and spark helpful reflection. Plus we get to learn about what’s important to others in the process.
In one word, what’s the most important aspect of your career?
Feel free to seek inspiration from the same question asked on Twitter:
For me that’s: Autonomy
Being happy.
Life is too short. If you dread getting up each day, giving up time with your nearest and dearest to work on stuff that doesn’t make you happy or challenges you, then what are you doing? If you have the luxury of doing something that you love, for a company that you want to work for and it will make you happy then go for it.
challenges
(technical ones)
Balance.
Balance of money and well being.
Enough money is a spectrum, not a fixed point. In a complex system you can balance out things in different ways.
opportunity.
For me that encompasses a lot
Interest - not primarily in a selfish sense, but in a way that this career makes my life more interesting, I’m never bored with what I do - it’s easy to change projects/companies and there are activities outside regular work that make things more interesting - like participating in communities, figuring out topics for blog posts, doing small side projects and more.
Environment.
If you have a relatively supportive manager and the majority of the team are reasonable people it makes working life a lot easier.
On the other hand if the team is populated with backstabbers out to find fault with ever second of your existence then life can be hell.
Learning
Decency
The people I work with, and the organisation are decent people. If thats the case I reckon anything else positive can happen.
Freedom.
Freedom to do my job the way I see fit.
Freedom to seek out opportunities to contribute.
Freedom to voice my opinions.
Freedom to choose my own direction to grow.
Freedom to make mistakes.
Freedom to be myself.
Satisfaction.
For a word that kind of rings of mediocre, i think it incorporates quite a lot. Money, challenge, responsibility and day to day work all need to be in the right balance to provide satisfaction to make me happy and eager to keep going, keep working.
Awareness.
Doing challenges, creating frameworks, setting up automation, having awesome reporting and creating cool trainings and all fun. But making others aware of what you do and what Testing / QA can do is, for me, the most important. As a consultant; it’s so hard to make some companies believe in the value of testing, so making them aware of what you do/can do will trigger then often and then the ball started to roll slowly. All you have to do, is kick it 
Learning. It can happen when I get good quality work, helpful and enthusiastic coworkers and when I am allowed to make some mistakes and learn from them. Learning well means earning more which is the eventual goal.
Very much enjoyed the replies. Thank you all for sharing.
So far we have the following:
)I reflect that this list would make for an epic set of values for a workplace! Perhaps something to bring back to your team to explore together.
Thanks for this interesting information!
Growth.
I don’t like the idea of stagnation.
If I don’t feel like I’m learning and growing, well guess what… 
Prosperity
This may be aspect of career that we should strive for.