RE: Meyers-Briggs, etc. and work (back OT)

["Nancy Osterhout" <bluetwilight -at- home -dot- com>]

Marguerite Krupp mentioned:

> Ahem... my Myers-Briggs profile suggested that I should be
an abbess.

To which John Garison replied:

> True confession time: When I was a senior in college, I
took one of those aptitude tests to tell me where I should
apply my liberal education. The result: I'd make a hell of a
preacher.  As I asked the person administering said test,
yes, but what do you do if you lack faith? Fake it?

and then John teased her:
>Back to you, Mother Superior.

In 1974 (yup, "74"), I took several of career-aptitude
tests, including the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indictor).  I
repeated that test 10 years later on a weekend retreat built
around it, and got the same result.  In 1990, I took it
again as part of our pre-marital counseling.  Same result.
I'm an ENFP.  I'm WAY HIGH on the Extrovert scale, which
anybody I know can tell you.  So, it's definitely built into
me to answer those questions the same way throughout my
life.  Nice to be consistent...

Careers for ENFP's include teaching, and that was fine with
me.  I could see myself doing that.

What threw me, though, was the results of a well-known
career aptitude test that I took back then.  Sorry, don't
remember the name of that test.

My test score was a 98th percentile for mortician.  And 95th
percentile for priest.  I think I got scored as "mortician"
because I'd marked all the questions that had to do with
belief about spiritual life continuing after our bodily
death with the strongest "yes" option.  I think the "priest"
one came about by the test having combined my
"mortician-type" answers to my answers around things like
serving people and explaining things that could lead to
teaching as a career.

I didn't feel particularly drawn to mortician or priest.
Many years later, though, I worked with teenagers at my
church, several of whom would come to be to discuss suicide
as an option for them or friends.  I'd been trained on how
to handle that.  Still... in the back of my mind, I
remembered those tests many years before.

And, yup, after about 10 years working in high tech, I was
at a point in my life when I started looking into becoming a
nun because the nuns I knew were having a great life, doing
meaningful teaching and having a lot of fun.

To bring this one back to tech writing ...

I teach in a way now as a procedure writer.  I'm exploring
instructional design as my next career direction.  I've got
some background in training.

It seems to me that the skills we use in communicating
technical (any kind of specialized) information can be used
just as well in fields when the specialized information to
be communicated has nothing to do with high technology.

Does anybody on this list use your technical communication
skills in fields other than software, hardware, or
networking?

<-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><->
Sit in reverie, and watch the changing color of the
waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
~~ H.W. Longfellow




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