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The career you have had The career you would prefer
The parts of your career you were sure about are the hardest to change. Where you weren't sure, look at the types that differ from yours on just that letter. Each one is a career very much like yours, different in one way, and could be a path worth exploring.
You were sure about every part of your career, so no type one letter away is an easy step from the career you have.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Nomad stays in one kind of work and keeps building on it. Your roles so far have varied somewhat. Picking the kind of work you like best and staying with it is an option too.
Very different roles, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Allrounder stays in similar environments, where the people and the rules are familiar. Your environments so far have varied somewhat. Choosing one world and putting down roots there could suit you as well.
Very different roles, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Mastery instead of Competence The Reinventor keeps working past competent, towards expert. You mostly stop once you're competent, but you could pick one area that matters to you and take it further.
Very different roles, very different environments, competent, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Mender holds several commitments at once. You mostly hold commitments one at a time, but maybe a part-time role or a side project next to your main work would suit you.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Nomad stays in one kind of work and keeps building on it. Your roles so far have varied somewhat. Picking the kind of work you like best and staying with it is an option too.
Very different roles, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Allrounder stays in similar environments, where the people and the rules are familiar. Your environments so far have varied somewhat. Choosing one world and putting down roots there could suit you as well.
Very different roles, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Mastery instead of Competence The Reinventor keeps working past competent, towards expert. You mostly stop once you're competent, but you could pick one area that matters to you and take it further.
Very different roles, very different environments, competent, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Mender holds several commitments at once. You mostly hold commitments one at a time, but maybe a part-time role or a side project next to your main work would suit you.
Very different roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Adapter's moves mostly start from their own search. Most of your moves came to you through offers. Going out and finding the next one yourself could take your career somewhere new.
Very different roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Adapter's moves mostly come from offers and assignments. Most of your moves started from your own search, but saying yes to an offer you didn't go looking for can open doors too.
Your result:
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The AdapterThe scan shows the career you've had. The trait test, which I'm building now, shows which of the sixteen types fits who you are, and how far your career is from that type.
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Your type in full: The Adapter
One of the Generalists, the family of careers that take on very different work in very different environments
Very different roles, in very different worlds, taken one at a time, each done well. (VWCS)
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In everyday English, an adapter is the small plug that lets a device work in a socket the device was not built for, such as the plug a traveller fits to a phone charger abroad. With the right adapter, one charger works in socket after socket. An Adapter career makes the person the adapter, learning very different work in a very different world at each move until the new work runs to a sound standard.
Coming soon
The AdapterThe scan shows the career you've had. The trait test, which I'm building now, shows which of the sixteen types fits who you are, and how far your career is from that type.
You are on the list as . Look in your inbox for the first email.
Our signup is not answering just now. This opens the newsletter's own signup page, with your address filled in.
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An Adapter (VWCS) career is built from single commitments, each a job in a kind of work and a world new to the Adapter, and each brought to a sound standard before the next begins. On the first day of each job the Adapter’s world, the work environment with its people and its habits, is as new as the work.
A housing officer at a city council joins a cruise line as purser, the officer in charge of passengers’ accounts and cabins on one of the line’s ships, then moves to the line’s office on land to plan the trips passengers take in each port. In the office on land, the former purser handles a passenger’s repeated complaint with a method learned at the council and checks a port’s rules with a friend still on the ship. Learning the land office’s booking system is the housing officer’s third time as a beginner, and the quickest.
Competence leaves each of an Adapter’s jobs with a manager ready to vouch for the work, such as the council’s housing manager and the ship’s captain. However, a manager’s word carries furthest inside that manager’s own sector, so an Adapter’s standing starts again at each move into a very different one.
A Varied career takes on kinds of work that have little in common, such as engineering, managing people and setting strategy. Each role asks for different skills and a different way of approaching the work.
At the other end, a Focused career stays with one kind of work and takes it deeper.
A Widespread career moves between very different worlds, such as a ministry, a startup and a charity, or one country's working life and another's. Each new world brings its own people, rules and habits, learned afresh at every move.
At the other end, a Rooted career stays in one recognisable world.
A Competence career gets solidly good at its work and holds that standard, putting the rest of its energy into more roles, more worlds or life outside work.
At the other end, a Mastery career keeps pushing past good enough, in at least one area and often in several.
At the other end, a Parallel career holds several commitments at once.
The first two letters of a code shape a working life more than the other two. How varied the roles are and how different their environments decide what a career is like from one year to the next, so the sixteen career types are grouped by those two letters into four families.
The method behind the types. Every career type here comes from one typology, built on five aspects of a career, each running between two ends. A type is the end a career sits nearest on each.
One kind of work, in similar environments
Very different work, in similar environments
One kind of work, across very different environments
Very different work, across very different environments
One commitment at a time, each done well, without seeking mastery
An army captain who commands a signals squadron leaves the service and joins a hotel chain as general manager of a two-hundred-room hotel near a port. Hotels are new to the captain, and an officer as manager is new to the hotel’s staff. The new manager’s rebuilt night-shift schedule halves the complaints about slow check-in by the end of the first year.
After two years at home looking after his mother, a former night-shift supervisor at a supermarket chain knows care work from the family’s side, and sets up his own home care service, hiring and training the carers himself. By its third year the service employs twelve carers, and every client sees the same carer at every visit.
A team leader at a holiday-booking call centre, in charge of twenty people on the phones, joins a recruitment agency as a consultant filling office posts for local firms. The pay by commission, the clients and the sales targets are all new to the former team leader. The agency asks the consultant to open its new branch in her second year, and that branch fills ninety posts in its first six months.
Every career type suits some people more than others, and part of the reason lies in their traits. The test measures the traits behind each letter of the code, and these four draw people to an Adapter career.
They are more excited by a new idea than by one they already know.
They go looking for contacts outside their usual circle, and networking events suit them.
Feedback that helps them master new skills is not what they go looking for.
They would rather finish one piece of work before starting the next.
Every Adapter career sits somewhere between Self-Led and Guided, depending on where its roles came from. Most careers hold some of each, and the variant follows the moves that shaped the career most. Self-Led or Guided
VWCSO, O for owned
A Self-Led Adapter chooses each move, and each move may bring new work, a new world, or both. A later move often starts with someone from an earlier world, such as a former client who now hires or a colleague who changed sector first. Choosing every move also lets a Self-Led Adapter pick worlds for the Adapter’s own reasons, a town near family, a sector with shorter hours or a job that teaches a language.
Each sector pays by its own scale, so a move into a very different sector can lower a Self-Led Adapter’s pay as easily as raise it. Most sectors publish their scales, through a union or in their job adverts, so the likely starting pay in a new sector can be known before the application goes in.
Busisiwe Mgangxela, a Self-Led AdapterBusisiwe Mgangxela trained as a nurse and midwife in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, taught nursing in Mthatha and nursed for two years in Saudi Arabia. Back home, Mgangxela decided to work for herself and set up a company that supplied food to schools. Growing vegetables for the school meals drew Mgangxela and her husband into farming full time. On Hillview Farm, forty-eight hectares in the Eastern Cape, the trained nurse now grows organic vegetables, indigenous greens and medicinal plants. A Self-Led Adapter (VWCS-O).
VWCSG, G for guided
Each move in a Guided Adapter career is proposed by someone else, often a former manager who has moved on to a very different world and asks the Adapter to follow. Being asked tells a Guided Adapter that someone inside the new world already judges the move a good fit. A posting or an agency contract usually runs for a set term, so a Guided Adapter can plan each job around an end date known from the start.
A Guided Adapter learns of each new world mostly from the people sending the Adapter there, who know the post’s duties better than the post’s daily life, so much of that daily life is learned after the start.
Fumiko Hayashi, a Guided AdapterFumiko Hayashi joined a textile company straight from high school and at thirty-one began selling cars for Honda, where she rose to branch manager. Later, a Volkswagen dealer recruited Hayashi to run its flagship Tokyo showroom, where sales more than doubled in four years. The Daiei supermarket chain then made Hayashi its chair and chief executive. Asked to run for mayor of Yokohama for her experience as a manager, Hayashi won the election. A Guided Adapter (VWCS-G).
Nakahama Manjirō was a fisherman from Tosa, Japan, when a shipwreck left him on an island and the American whaler John Howland took him to Massachusetts. Manjirō studied navigation in Fairhaven, crewed a whaler, dug for gold in California and sailed home. The shogunate made the returned sailor a hatamoto, a retainer of the shogun, and an interpreter. When the Kanrin Maru’s captain and admiral fell ill in a storm, Manjirō is said to have brought the ship into port. A Guided Adapter (VWCS-G).
Susana Malcorra trained as an electrical engineer in Rosario and spent her first career in business, in leadership posts at IBM Argentina and then Telecom Argentina. The United Nations World Food Programme made the executive its chief operating officer. Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s Secretary-General, then appointed Malcorra to run the Department of Field Support, and later made her his chief of staff. President Macri of Argentina then named Malcorra foreign minister. A Guided Adapter (VWCS-G).
Kate Silverton trained with the BBC on its regional programme Look North and became a presenter of the BBC’s national news, including as deputy presenter of the News at One. Becoming a mother turned Silverton’s interest in psychology toward young children. Three years after saying publicly that she meant to train as a child therapist, Silverton left the BBC to train. Silverton has since qualified and works in a primary school with young children who have complex needs. A Self-Led Adapter (VWCS-O).
Busisiwe Mgangxela trained as a nurse and midwife in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, taught nursing in Mthatha and nursed for two years in Saudi Arabia. Back home, Mgangxela decided to work for herself and set up a company that supplied food to schools. Growing vegetables for the school meals drew Mgangxela and her husband into farming full time. On Hillview Farm, forty-eight hectares in the Eastern Cape, the trained nurse now grows organic vegetables, indigenous greens and medicinal plants. A Self-Led Adapter (VWCS-O).
Fumiko Hayashi joined a textile company straight from high school and at thirty-one began selling cars for Honda, where she rose to branch manager. Later, a Volkswagen dealer recruited Hayashi to run its flagship Tokyo showroom, where sales more than doubled in four years. The Daiei supermarket chain then made Hayashi its chair and chief executive. Asked to run for mayor of Yokohama for her experience as a manager, Hayashi won the election. A Guided Adapter (VWCS-G).
At work, an Adapter brings a sound standard to unfamiliar work within months, and a team new to the Adapter soon notices.
Having learned more than one set of unwritten rules, they pick up the next one faster.
Having worked on both sides, they can explain each to the other.
One commitment means nobody wonders whose side they are on.
The level they work at is the one newcomers are aiming for, so they can show how to reach it.
A sound standard reached in a few months covers the ordinary run of a new job, and the rare and difficult cases of the same job are best known to the job’s veterans. A veteran’s doubt about an Adapter’s plan is often the first sign that the plan has met a rare case the Adapter has not yet seen.
A capable newcomer can learn each job in the seven paths below at work or on a short course, within a few months, and the paths run from frontline posts to senior ones.
Paths that begin in a navy or an international organisation tend to start Guided and turn Self-Led at the move into a new sector.
Naval officer, ship operations manager, director of the city’s tourism office
Fundraiser, policy adviser, country director
Shop manager, product manager, director of members’ services
Waiter, care assistant, manager of the association’s sheltered homes
Civil engineer, emergency programme manager, regional union officer
Parent at home, nursery assistant, charity manager
Police constable, claims handler, head of visitor services
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits an Adapter.
In job adverts the word usually means a manager trained in no single profession. On this site the word belongs to careers that change both the work and the world, an Adapter’s included. VWThe Generalists
An Adapter career turns international when a job lies abroad, as for a hotel manager who takes over a hotel in another country, and expat fits while the Adapter lives there.
Said of an army officer who goes on to run a hotel and then a recruitment agency’s branch, and meant as praise for the range.
The first month in a new world settles most of what an Adapter’s move will be worth. By the end of that month the new colleagues have formed a view of the newcomer, and the newcomer has learned the routine the rest of the job builds on.
In the first week of a new job, an Adapter can tell the new team which parts of the work are new to the Adapter and what the Adapter brings from earlier work, so colleagues know where to help and where to ask.
An Adapter can tell the run of very different jobs to one person working in the next sector, over a coffee, and keep the parts of the story that the listener asks more about.
At each review with a manager, an Adapter can agree one target for the coming months that the job has not yet reached, such as a shorter wait at a hotel’s front desk or a new service for an agency’s clients, so the job keeps something to aim at.
Two or three signs that would show a move into a new sector was a mistake, written down at the offer and checked at the end of the first month, give an Adapter an early answer to a move made without a trial.
The same post advertised several times in one year, on a recruitment site or in a council’s list of vacancies, marks a job that people leave. An Adapter who spots a post advertised several times can ask at the interview why the post keeps falling empty.
| The skill |  Varied |  Widespread |  Competence |  Serial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Learning agility Learning a very different job by working beside the colleague who does it best, from the first week. VC | Serves Varied | Serves Competence | ||
| Checking habits of thought Noticing which habits from the last world are steering a decision in the new one, and checking each habit against how the new world works. W | Serves Widespread | |||
| Earning influence Winning a new team's trust by taking on, in the first month, a task the team has long put off. WC | Serves Widespread | Serves Competence | ||
| Deciding under uncertainty Putting odds on how a move into an unfamiliar sector will go, and judging the decision apart from how the job turns out. WS | Serves Widespread | Serves Serial | ||
| Changing well Asking the predecessor in each new job for one page on how the job is really done, and leaving the same page for the successor. WS | Serves Widespread | Serves Serial | ||
| A philosophy to live by Knowing the few things the Adapter wants from any job, such as a team to lead or a town to live in, and judging each very different offer against those few things. VS | Serves Varied | Serves Serial |
The Nomad and the Allrounder reach an Adapter career from opposite sides, the Nomad by changing the work and the Allrounder by changing the world.
A string of very different worlds, with one kind of work done well in each. A Nomad career becomes an Adapter career when the next post brings very different work.
One world, and very different roles inside it, each done well. An Allrounder career becomes an Adapter career once the next very different role lies in a very different world.
VWCSA city council, a cruise line and a hotel chain can each hand a job their own people know well to the same Adapter, a newcomer from a very different world.
An Adapter career in which one kind of work is taken past the standard the work asks.
The Adapter’s run of very different jobs, once a second commitment is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
Further on lies the Polymath (VWMP), where an Adapter’s range gains depth in one role and several roles at once
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Coming soon
The AdapterThe scan shows the career you've had. The trait test, which I'm building now, shows which of the sixteen types fits who you are, and how far your career is from that type.
You are on the list as . Look in your inbox for the first email.
Our signup is not answering just now. This opens the newsletter's own signup page, with your address filled in.
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