How careers differ

It picks a few dimensions and crosses them into types

There are typologies for almost everything. Climates are sorted by their temperature and rainfall, cars by the shape of their body, and blood by its type. Each one picks a few differences that matter, gives each of them a small number of ends, and crosses them, so that every combination is a type.

That is what sets a typology apart from a taxonomy. A taxonomy finds its groups in the cases it has, the way biology sorts living things into species. A typology decides its dimensions first, and every combination of them is a type, whether or not anyone has met it yet.¹1Kenneth D. Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies: An Introduction to Classification Techniques (Sage, 1994), on the typology as a conceptual classification built by crossing chosen dimensions and the taxonomy as one drawn from observed cases. David Collier, Jody LaPorte and Jason Seawright, "Putting typologies to work: concept formation, measurement, and analytic rigor," Political Research Quarterly 65(1), 2012, 217 to 232, call typologies "organized systems of types". doi:10.1177/1065912912437162.

That lets you compare, explain and decide

Nobody can hold every case in mind. A category gives you a great deal of information for very little effort, which the psychologist Eleanor Rosch called cognitive economy.²2Eleanor Rosch, "Principles of categorization," in Rosch and Lloyd (eds), Cognition and Categorization (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978). Her first principle: what one wants from categories is "a great deal of information about the environment while conserving finite resources as much as possible." The paper is about everyday categories, not careers. Tell someone a climate is Mediterranean and they know a lot about its summers before they have seen it.

A typology does that on purpose. It tells you which few differences matter, so you can compare two cases, explain one to someone else in a word, and see what would change if a case moved from one type to another.

Personality typologies sort people, and interest typologies sort kinds of work

Myers-Briggs sorts people into sixteen types on four pairs of opposites. The Big Five does not sort people into types at all. It scores them on five traits, and the colour models sort people into four styles. Holland's six interest types sort people and kinds of work alike, and occupation lists sort jobs: the international one groups every job in the world into 436 small groups.³3International Labour Organization, International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08) (ILO, 2012), which "classifies jobs into 436 unit groups", gathered into 130 minor, 43 sub-major and 10 major groups.

The few typologies of whole careers each see one or two differences

Typologies of whole careers do exist, mostly in career research. In the 1950s Donald Super sorted careers by how settled they became, into patterns such as stable, conventional, unstable and multiple-trial, with separate patterns for women's careers.⁴4Donald E. Super, The Psychology of Careers (Harper, 1957). Four patterns for men (stable, conventional, unstable, multiple-trial) and seven for women, among them double-track and interrupted, built from following careers over time. Rosabeth Moss Kanter sorted them by how they advance: up a hierarchy, through a craft or by building something of your own.⁵5Rosabeth Moss Kanter, "Careers and the wealth of nations: a macro-perspective on the structure and implications of career forms," in Arthur, Hall and Lawrence (eds), Handbook of Career Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 506 to 522. Three forms: bureaucratic, professional and entrepreneurial. And Michael Driver and Kenneth Brousseau sorted them into four career concepts, Linear, Expert, Spiral and Transitory.⁶6Kenneth R. Brousseau, Michael J. Driver, Kristina Eneroth and Rikard Larsson, "Career pandemonium: realigning organizations and individuals," Academy of Management Executive 10(4), 1996, 23 to 39. The four concepts describe careers that climb, deepen, broaden every few years or change often, one commitment at a time.

Each of them sees something real, and each sees one or two of the ways careers differ, mostly how often you move and how high you climb. None of them tells changing your work apart from changing your world, few see holding several commitments at once, and none is open for you to apply to your own career. Others that sound close, such as the boundaryless and protean career profiles, sort how willing you are to move rather than how you actually moved.⁷7Jon P. Briscoe and Douglas T. Hall, "The interplay of boundaryless and protean careers: combinations and implications," Journal of Vocational Behavior 69(1), 2006, 4 to 18, eight profiles from crossing career attitudes with mobility. Brenton M. Wiernik and Jack W. Kostal, "Protean and boundaryless career orientations: a critical review and meta-analysis," Journal of Counseling Psychology, 2019, doi:10.1037/cou0000324, find the boundaryless measures capture openness to mobility, not actual movement.

Four teachers show what none of them can see

Consider four people who have each spent forty years in schools. The first has taught chemistry at the same school the whole time. The second started as a chemistry teacher and then, at the same school, became head of year, ran its finances and finally became its head. The third has taught chemistry in a state school, at an international school in Singapore, in a prison and on a university access course. The fourth teaches part-time, writes textbooks, sets exams for an exam board and runs a small tutoring business, all in the same years.

A personality typology might find that all four like explaining things to people. An occupation list files all four under teaching. The career concepts call the first and the third both Expert careers, a lifelong commitment to one profession, though one stayed in a single school and the other worked in four very different worlds. And the fourth has no place among them at all, because each concept describes one commitment after another.

Yet their working lives have almost nothing in common. The first two stayed in one school, while the other two moved between very different settings. The first and third did one kind of work, while the second and fourth took on very different kinds, and only the fourth held several commitments at once.

The four teachers differ in a small number of ways, and so does every other career. This typology calls those ways aspects. Each aspect is a scale with two ends, and a career can sit anywhere between them.

AspectThe question it asks about a careerIts two ends

Role breadthHow different are the roles you take onFFocused (F) or Varied (V)V

Environment breadthHow different are the environments you do them inRRooted (R) or Widespread (W)W

Depth pursuitDo you stop at competence or go on towards masteryCCompetence (C) or Mastery (M)M

ConcurrencyDo you hold one commitment at a time or severalSSerial (S) or Parallel (P)P

OriginDid your commitments come from you or come to youOSelf-Led (O) or Guided (G)G

The first four aspects decide which of the sixteen types a career is. The fifth, origin, does not change the type. Instead it gives the type one of two variants, Self-Led or Guided. And each aspect is read separately, so where a career sits on one of them does not settle where it sits on any other.

The typology keeps only what shows in a career and changes your next move

Careers differ in many ways, and the typology uses only the ones that pass three checks. It shows in what a career has done, not in what its owner wants. It changes which next move makes sense. And careers differ on it enough to set one type apart from another.

Some things that sound important did not pass. Moving up the ladder is mostly a change of role, which role breadth already counts. The kind of organisation tells you little, because every type is found in every kind. And motives and attitudes describe the person rather than the career, so they belong to the traits.

Role breadth asks how different the roles you take on are

Every time you take on a very different role, you start again as a beginner. You learn new methods, a new vocabulary and a new idea of what good work looks like. Some careers do that often and build a wide range of know-how. Others hardly ever do it, and build a narrow range that goes deep.

Read more: Role breadth

Environment breadth asks how different the environments you work in are

Moving to a very different environment means relearning everything nobody writes down, even when the work stays the same. You have to learn how people talk, what they find funny, how fast they work, and what gets someone trusted or quietly sidelined. Some careers do that many times. Others stay in one environment and know its rules by heart.

Read more: Environment breadth

Depth pursuit asks whether you stop at competence or keep going towards mastery

Everyone who stays in a line of work long enough becomes good at it. What happens next divides careers. Some hold that standard and spend their energy on other things. Others keep raising the bar in at least one thing for decades, whether or not anyone asks them to.

Read more: Depth pursuit

Concurrency asks whether you hold one commitment at a time or several

Holding one commitment at a time gives each one your full attention. Holding several at once gives you variety, a second income or a second identity, and it divides your week between them. The difference shapes an ordinary Tuesday more than almost anything else in a career.

Read more: Concurrency

Origin asks whether your commitments came from you or came to you

Some careers are made of moves their owner went out and got. Others are made of moves that were offered, assigned or left as the only option. Both can lead to the same jobs, and they ask very different things of the person living them. So the fifth aspect asks where the commitments in a career came from.

Read more: Origin

Put together, the five aspects describe a whole career in five letters. The first four say which of the sixteen types the career is closest to, and the fifth, after a hyphen, says which of its two variants it is.

The code has one letter per aspect, in a fixed order

Each letter says which end of one aspect the career is nearest to. The letters come in a fixed order, which is role breadth, environment breadth, depth pursuit and concurrency, and then origin after the hyphen.

Take a nurse who worked on an acute ward, in a remote community clinic, on a cruise ship, in a prison and in an IVF clinic. She held one role throughout, so the first letter is F. Those are very different environments, so the second letter is W. She was solidly good and content to stay there, so the third letter is C. She held one post at a time, so the fourth letter is S.

No employer offers a sequence like hers, so she found and applied for every post herself, and the fifth letter is O. That makes her career a Self-Led Nomad, FWCS-O.

FFocusedRole breadth

She held one role throughout

WWidespreadEnvironment breadth

Those are very different environments

CCompetenceDepth pursuit

She was solidly good and content to stay there

SSerialConcurrency

She held one post at a time

-

OSelf-LedOrigin

No employer offers a sequence like hers, so she found and applied for every post herself

One code describes an entire working life. That is why a break does not start a new career. Redundancy, illness, caring, migration and a company going under are part of a career just as much as any job is.

Your career so far is read from what you have done, and your best fit from who you are

A code can describe two different things. The first is your career so far, every commitment from your first job to today, read as one whole. It describes what has happened, and it is read from your history.

The second is your best fit, the type of career your character traits point to. It describes what would suit you, and it is read from you rather than from anything you have done. It is a suggestion, not a plan. You may be moving towards it, you may have other reasons to stay where you are, or it may be a direction you have not yet considered.

The two often differ, especially early in a career or after a life-changing event. For example, a young doctor whose posts so far were allocated by a training scheme has so far had the career of a Guided Perennial (FRCS-G). But her traits may point to a very different career, one that combines medicine with research in more than one country. Where the two codes differ, and by how many letters, is the gap between the career you have and the one that would suit you.

The two ends of each of the first four aspects combine in sixteen ways. Each combination is a career type with its own name, and the sixteen fall into four families: the Specialists, the Locals, the Voyagers and the Generalists.

Read more: The sixteen types