There are Sikh building contractors, business executives, civil servants, drivers, lumbermen, market vendors, peddlers, policeman, school teachers, shop keepers, and bus operators. Additionally a few in the fields of medicine and law and some in nearly all walks of life in Fiji.
Sikhs place a very high value on productive effort and make pursuit of wealth not only a virtue but a duty. They maintain that each person should choose his/her own work and that whatever he/she chooses to do for a living, they should pursue it with a sense of religious conviction.
Because of their traditional connection with agriculture most of the Sikh immigrants looked for work in the farming localities, especially in Suva, mostly in the areas like Tamavua and Nasinu, and started small farms. A few found laboring jobs in the city of Suva while a majority moved to the cane-lands of the west in Nadi, Lautoka, Ba, and Tavua. This is where most of Sikhs settled as cane cultivators themselves after spending on an average two or three years as farm laborers.
A Sikh farmer's hours of work began very early in the morning and finished quite late in the evening. Many of the Fiji Sikh farmers helped each other and so saved spending money on labor.
In the early days in the west the cane farmers thrived under the most difficult of circumstances, as heavy machinery had not yet arrived they built their foundations with lots of hard manual labor and with the help of ox driven ploughs.
In later years there was widespread awareness among the cane farmers, especially the richer Sikhs, of the value of mechanization. Along with the use of new seed varities and commercial fertilizers, hundreds of tractors had been acquired to modernize the farms.
Apart from cane cultivation, a number of Sikhs were engaged in dairy farming which was carried on in the wetter parts of Fiji where rice could be grown profitably. Some of the Sikh dairy farmers who did not supply milk or cream to the factories, sold their milk to the Gujarati and other residents of Suva and turn the suplus into ghee.
A number of Sikhs were found in the timber industry as well, most of the timber mills were small and there was not much capital to install modern and efficient machinery. Since the demand for timber was heavy and cost of imported timber relatively high, these small operators, in spite of many problems, were able to make some profit even as machinery and equipment were outdated.