How careers differ

It picks a few differences and combines 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 few options that rule each other out, usually two, and combines them, so that every unique combination is a type. Blood is the cleanest case. Three yes-or-no differences, whether it carries the A marker, the B marker and the Rhesus marker, combine into the eight main blood types, from A positive to O negative.¹1NHS Blood and Transplant, Blood types: "There are eight main blood types", the letter from the ABO system and positive or negative from the Rh system, and O negative blood type: "Everyone can receive O negative red blood cells", while "people with O negative blood can only receive red cell donations from O negative donors." Rare antibodies are why the page says almost anyone.

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 chooses its differences first, and every combination of them is a type.²2Kenneth 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.

Typologies let 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.³3Eleanor 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 in a word, and decide what to do. Tell a doctor you are O negative and they know two things at once: your red blood cells can go to almost anyone, and you can receive red cells only from another O negative donor.

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

Myers-Briggs sorts people into sixteen types on four pairs of opposites. Many online tests sort you into one of a handful of personality archetypes, or animals, or something else again. And the colour models sort people into four styles, the best known being the Red, Yellow, Green and Blue of Thomas Erikson's book Surrounded by Idiots.⁴4Thomas Erikson, Surrounded by Idiots (Omgiven av idioter, 2014), four colours built on the DISC model.

Other typologies sort the work. Holland's six interest types, from Realistic to Conventional, describe both people and kinds of work, so that a career test can match one to the other. And occupation lists sort the jobs themselves: the list kept by the International Labour Organization groups every job in the world into 436 small groups.⁵5International 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.⁶6Donald 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.⁷7Rosabeth 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.⁸8Kenneth 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 environment, and few see holding several commitments at once. 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.⁹9Jon 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 with one job title have four different careers

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 environments. And the fourth has no place in the existing typologies, which rarely account for a portfolio of several commitments held at the same time.

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 has 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.

Role breadth asks how different the roles you take on are

Taking on a very different role means learning 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 take on a new type of work, sticking to very similar roles throughout their working life.¹⁰10Nigel Nicholson, "A theory of work role transitions," Administrative Science Quarterly 29(2), 1984, 172 to 191, on how far a new role departs from what you already know, and the learning and adjustment that asks of you.

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 never have to adapt to a new culture.¹¹11Meryl Reis Louis, "Surprise and sense making: what newcomers experience in entering unfamiliar organizational settings," Administrative Science Quarterly 25(2), 1980, on the surprises of entering an unfamiliar setting and the sense-making they demand.

Read more: Environment breadth

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

The least we can expect from a professional is competence. Some prefer to hold that standard and spend their energy on other things. Others, however, keep raising the bar for decades. They strive for expertise and even mastery, whether or not anyone asks them to.¹²12Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance," Psychological Review 100(3), 1993, 363 to 406: expert performance comes from at least a decade of sustained, effortful practice. Later studies find the effect real but smaller (Macnamara and Maitra, 2019). Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind over Machine (1986), put competence in the middle of five stages, with proficiency and expertise beyond it. One carpenter makes similar furniture for a whole career, and makes it well. Another keeps taking on more complex pieces.

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 focus between them. The split can run within a week or from one week to the next, come and go as it does for a reservist or a volunteer firefighter, or follow the seasons.¹³13Campion, Caza and Moss, "Multiple jobholding: an integrative systematic review and future research agenda," Journal of Management 46(1), 2020, 165 to 191, on why people hold several jobs and what it does to them. doi:10.1177/0149206319882756. In the United States about one worker in twenty holds more than one job: 5.2 percent in February 2026, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey (FRED, series LNU02026620). For example, a senior economist at a central bank who also works as a carpenter several days a week holds two at once.

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.¹⁴14Douglas T. Hall, "The protean career: a quarter-century journey," Journal of Vocational Behavior 65(1), 2004, 1 to 13, on careers in which the person rather than the organisation is in charge. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2003.10.006. The contrast with careers made of moves that were offered or assigned is this typology's.

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 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 the order of the five aspects above.

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

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

Your career 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 scheme¹⁵15UK Foundation Programme Office, 2026 Foundation Programme allocation: new doctors in the United Kingdom are allocated to foundation schools and programmes, ranked by their preferences. 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 one-minute scan reads your career so far. The trait test, coming soon, will read your best fit, so you can put the two side by side.

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Which of the sixteen types fits you?

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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.

These are ideal types, and most real careers sit somewhere in between.¹⁶16The sociologist Max Weber called such a type an ideal type, a pure case that "cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality" ("Objectivity in social science and social policy," 1904). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Max Weber, section 5.2. The code names the type a career is closest to.

Read more: The sixteen types

Where do the five aspects come from?

The five aspects come from my own thinking about careers, mine and other people's, and from what others have written about them. That includes the career typologies above, the research on career anchors and on protean, boundaryless and portfolio careers, and books such as The 100-Year Life, Range, Antifragile and Designing Your Life.¹⁷17Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, The 100-Year Life (Bloomsbury, 2016), David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (Riverhead, 2019), Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (Random House, 2012), and Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (2016). On career anchors, Edgar Schein, Career Dynamics (Addison-Wesley, 1978), and on the portfolio life, Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason (1989).

Many of those typologies assume a great deal about how a career runs. For example, Donald Super's career patterns needed a separate set for women, built around homemaking.⁶ Others assume a career inside one organisation, or one job at a time. So each of them fits only some of the sixteen types. The aim here is the most granular, actionable view of a career: five aspects that you can each see in your own history and act on in your next move, regardless of what your working life looks like.

Why these five aspects?

Careers differ in many ways, so an aspect made it in only if it passed three tests:

1. 1

   It shows in what a career has done, not in what its owner wants.

2. 2

   It changes which next move makes sense.

3. 3

   Careers differ on it enough to tell one type from another.

Some things that sound important did not make it. Moving up the ladder is not an aspect of its own, because a promotion is mostly a change of role, and role breadth already counts it.¹⁸18Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, "Promotions and the Peter Principle," Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(4), 2019, 2085 to 2134: the best salespeople are promoted into management, a different job, and often do it less well. MIT DSpace.

The kind of organisation fails the third test, because people on wildly different career paths pass through the same organisations, sometimes even holding the same job at the same time. For example, a salesperson at a timber merchant may have held that role for thirty years, moved over from the sawmill, or come from selling cars. So the organisation you work for now says little about the career path you have travelled.

And motives and attitudes fail the first test, because they describe the person rather than the career.

What about how a career moves from one thing to the next?

Some angles of the other typologies still have no aspect of their own, such as how quickly a career moves on, or whether one commitment overlaps the next. That is because the five aspects of Your Career Type describe the shape of a career, not how it came to have that shape. How you make your transitions, and how several commitments sit together, are layers I am working on. They will not change your type, but they will say more about how you live it.

Does a break start a new career?

No. One code describes an entire working life. Redundancy, illness, caring, migration and a company going under are part of a career just as much as any job is.