Unemployment: Personality Types

Day Two of the Career Planning Workshop

We are becoming more comfortable with one another and the facilitator is recommending one-on-one time between myself and those who have mentioned post-secondary planning as a way to meet their career goals. Awesome.  I've also been given a number of compliments from my fellow participants who think I'm definitely considering the right path with a career counselling role (every little bit helps!).

Today we focused on personality types.  I knew what mine was back in the day but I was, unfortunately, quite narrow-minded when I was in school.  Until my fourth year, I was adamant that I would be applying for law school.  Fortunately for me, my life went into a bit of a tailspin and I figured out that law school would only lead to a definite loss of work/life balance.  I didn't want that.  Whoops.

In any case, I was more open to the process now and much more interested in learning more about what my likes and dislikes said about the kind of work I would really enjoy.  First of all, I discovered my personality type is really at odds with extremely structured environments.  This is not to say I couldn't work in them, just that I prefer not to.  Work environments that promote creativity, flexibility and openness to change are ones I excel within.  I paid attention and I made a career-changing connection.

There is a particular industry I have been so focused on that it led me to my last job.  This industry (in my experience) only offers the work environment that I love about a third of the time.  The rest of the time, it is highly inflexible and creatively stifling.  I made the decision right then to remove it from my work search.  That is the biggest "a-ha" moment I had today.

We've done more than a few tests and I've been thrilled to find that so many of my interest areas have come up.  Even though I'm sure I've decided what I'm going to do I know I want the opportunity for advancement. I'm still keeping schooling in the back of my mind (it's "Plan B" if I don't have work by the end of August) so I'm doing a lot of research.  Most of my research is centred around career planning but I'm checking other things out because of certain things I really enjoy, like training and workshops.  I think I'd like to have the opportunity to design them as well so that's shaping my research also.

Bonus: we were given free access to "Career Cruising" by virtue of taking the workshop.  It's a great program (accessible from home) and it's been very helpful as well.  If nothing else, all of the recurring outcomes have strengthened my belief that I'm heading in the right direction.  I've also been spending time on LinkedIn, going through profiles to view work and education histories of people in the business.  It's been nice to see so many similarities, education-wise, so I have a pretty good idea of what I am looking for to add to my credentials.  I'm still using ALIS and even Google has been helpful for finding companies (big and small) where I can focus my work search.

Reminder, if you have three days to devote to this session (and you're in Alberta) I recommend it! Register here.