With summer coming to an end, and the course adjustment deadline at her high school fast approaching, Samantha was becoming impatient about getting closure on her career decision. “I need to figure out a direction for my life”, she told me.

Impressed by her motivation and sense of urgency, I suggested we schedule our next session sooner rather than later. Prior to this, I met with Samantha very briefly to assign her some homework to prepare for our session. I loaned her a copy of “MBTI Type Tables for Occupations” by Nancy Schaubhut and Richard Thompson. This resource provides type tables for 250 occupations, which includes for each occupation sampled, the total number and percentages of each of the 16 MBTI personality types.

I instructed Samantha to go through each occupation, flagging the ones with the highest relative participation rates for her personality type. Knowing the characteristic strengths of her type to include organizing information, using technology and systems, and working independently, I asked Samantha to create a spreadsheet to record the results of her research to use during our next session.

True to form, she rank-ordered in descending order from highest to lowest, participation rates of her type in each occupation that was a fit. In addition, she highlighted in bold the ones that sounded intriguing. She identified 14 occupations to consider.

Next, I took Samantha through a word-association exercise. As we examined each occupation, I read out to her a description and checked her understanding of the job. Then I asked her to tell me the first word that came to her mind when I read out the title of each occupation. I recorded these, and later asked her whether each of these words had a positive or a negative connotation. We then eliminated the options where her word choice was negative.   I then categorized what we were left with into 1 of 2 streams: Sciences and Creative.

In the Sciences category were: Medical Scientist, Biochemist, Microbiologist, Biologist, and Veterinarian. In the Creative category were Writer/Author and Interior Designer. She decided against Veterinarian (“because of the interaction required with pet owners”) and Interior Designer (because she realized she could do this as a hobby). We then discussed the fact that the science occupations on the list would include research and report-writing job duties, and she decided that as long as writing was part of her job, even report writing would satisfy this need for her.

We get excited and celebrate the smallest of things … because often it is the small things that signal progress!

Here we are with our NEW Work in Progress Banner.   We’ll have the opportunity to use it on June 5th for our first Workshop Information Session!