Our research investigates social, cognitive, and environmental factors that may be associated with the work values of 17–18-year-olds in Ireland and examines if these findings remain consistent at age 20. It also explores if both genders have diverse work value preferences and scrutinizes the role of school type and career guidance in influencing work values. The data is obtained from the Child Cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of children, the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) wave 3 and wave 4. We use visualizations to build an understanding of work value choices and model results. Ordered heatmaps have been used for picking interesting features and mapping the association between work values and potential factors influencing these work values. Self-beliefs of adolescents about work, family, and religion, along with cognitive scores, are found to be associated with work value selection, while career guidance and school type have limited importance. The results reveal that the two genders have different choices of work values. Work values can be broadly classified as intrinsic which are bringers of inner peace and psychological satisfaction like an interesting job and extrinsic which are led by external reward-based job aspirations like high income. Our research indicates that girls tend to pick more intrinsic work values compared to boys. Contradictory to the findings from other similar studies carried out in different countries, job security was found to be a more popular choice among Irish adolescent males compared to females, but became a more desirable choice for females as the adolescents transitioned to adulthood.