A note I sent to the CEO of EmployIndy regarding the JA Spark Career Fair planned for September, 2016.
I can’t help thinking that career clusters are (or will be)
obsolete.
Who would have predicted IT for me when I graduated Purdue
with an engineering degree? But I took a test in high school that did
predict I would be good at programming. Maybe I was analytical.
Liked problem solving. I also liked risk. I could have joined the
risk taking entrepreneur tech startup cluster if one existed J
Does EmployIndy do any kind of testing like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Interest_Inventory.
The modern version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes
I really liked this explanation of how people pick careers –
and just how old the problem of finding a place for yourself in the world is.
In "The
Holland Codes," a letter or code stands for a particular "type."
Psychologist John L. Holland originally labeled his six types as: "motoric, intellectual,
esthetic, supportive, persuasive, and conforming."[2] He
later developed and changed them to: Realistic (Doers), Investigative
(Thinkers), Artistic (Creators), Social (Helpers), Enterprising (Persuaders),
and Conventional (Organizers)."[6] Professor
John Johnson of Penn State suggested that an alternative way of categorizing
the six types would be through ancient social roles: "hunters (Realistic), shamans
(Investigative), artisans (Artistic), healers (Social), leaders (Enterprising),
and lorekeepers (Conventional)."[7]
I think the whole cluster idea is wrong – those are assemblies
of jobs. The jobs are what someone is interested in doing. Maybe
there should be leadership, inventing, making things, working outdoors, problem
solving, stress averse, helping people, art. You can be in construction
but be in HR – more like a helper than a builder. I also think it is
naive to reduce the range of human interests into eight or so
government/economic job clusters. There are lots more type of jobs, there
will be many that go away (say radiologists,) some you can’t predict will emerge
(like app developer in 1975) and one-offs.
