The most promising of these, whose depths I have yet to plumb, is InternsOver40 -- a blog about people making intentional and sharp career changes later in life.It's laid out a little capriciously, IMO, and somewhat hard to read, but the content makes it worthwhile. I look forward to following it.
As I began to explore the material on this blog, I found links to other sites with a similar theme which, in turn, linked me to things like skills assessment tests and the like. It's like...I don't know...a "web" or something.
One of the bits I ended up on was a step-by-step skills assessment based on Holland RIASEC Types. While there are several sites that will help you do this assessment, I found one hosted by the University of Waterloo (I'm ignoring the irony) which was free, though fairly manual. The process goes like this:
1. Think of things you did in your life that you were proud of. ("I did that!"). Pick the top seven.
2. Write a short story about each one as if you were explaining your achievement to a child. Depending on your comfort level with putting things into words, this could take 30 minutes or several hours.
3. Next, go through a structured matrix, identifying the characteristics you showed in each story. Pick the top five most important to you.
4. Go through a structured matrix, identifying the skills you showed in each story. Pick the top five.
5. Go through a structured matrix, identifying the values that were important to you in each story. Pick the top five.
6. Finally, map these characteristics, skills, and values onto a graph of six specific "types" and you'll see what kind of job you'd most like to do. In theory.
First, here's a picture of the matrix. There are six types: Realistic Doer, Investigative Thinker, Artistic Creator, Social Helper, Enterprising Persuader, and Conventional Organizer.
The outer, blue wheel lists career clusters while the inner white wheel lists representative jobs. I mapped my results into a spreadsheet (naturally) and displayed them as a spider chart:
You can see that I'm strongly biased towards the "Investigative Thinker" type, with a smattering of "Artistic Creator" and "Realistic Doer". This means I'm more comfortable with ideas and things than people, that I'm thorough and highly analytical, but I have a need for self-expression and I like just to "get things done". This feels right and it's interesting to see how some of the careers I'd been considering map onto this chart.
- Product Manager definitely fits the bill for Investigative Thinker, but I think my needs to "get things done" and express myself cause some dissatisfaction there.
- Baker is a combination of Realistic Doer and Artistic Creator, but I think its lack of analytics would eventually leave me unsatisfied.
- Writer fits the bill for all three, though I tend to struggle with the concept of when it's "done".
- Teacher? Maybe. It's got a pretty strong whiff of Social Helper, where I don't score highly. But with older students and more complex concepts, it might be a good choice.
There's another idea here that intrigues me, though -- visual analytics. I'm good at recognizing what data needs to be captured, getting it, understanding it, and making it understandable by others. This is essentially what I've done with Win-Loss analysis in previous PM jobs. So maybe there's a specific job here that I just don't know about. Think Gallup (targeted) + Tufte (customized).
Anyway, I have some ideas that I'm going to explore over the next week or so. Balls are already rolling, as it were. Stay tuned for more.
The other thing I've realized is that this is the last self-assessment I plan on doing at the moment.They're all essentially telling me the same thing, though they're coming at it from different angles. While they've all had good, unique things to say, I'm beginning to hear the empty-can-rattle of diminishing returns. And, as a Realistic Doer would say "it's time for action".
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