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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, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Perennial 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, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Adapter moves across very different environments. Your career so far has been somewhat rooted, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. You could look for a new sector, a different culture or another country, for instance.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Mastery instead of Competence The Steward 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, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Keystone 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, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Perennial 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, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Adapter moves across very different environments. Your career so far has been somewhat rooted, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. You could look for a new sector, a different culture or another country, for instance.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Mastery instead of Competence The Steward 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, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Keystone 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, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Allrounder'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, similar environments, competent, one at a time.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Allrounder'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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Your type in full: The Allrounder
One of the Locals, the family of careers that stay in similar environments
Very different roles, in one world, taken one at a time, each done well. (VRCS)
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In everyday English, an all-rounder is someone who can turn their hand to many things and do each of them well. In sport it is the player picked for more than one skill, like a cricketer who can bat and bowl. The career borrows the word for that range, spread across a working life rather than one match, one role at a time.
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The AllrounderThe 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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An Allrounder (VRCS) takes on one very different job after another in the same world, and does each of them well.
The roles have little in common with one another, and each is held until it runs smoothly and the next one comes up. Their world, their work environment, stays the same, so each new job starts with the Allrounder already knowing who to ask.
A baggage handler at a regional airport who moved to the check-in desk, then to planning the ground crews’ shifts, then to running the terminal’s customer service has been new at the work four times without once leaving the airport. That world can be much larger than one employer. A county’s courts, a cathedral city or the hotel trade of one seaside town counts too, as long as the people and the ways of working stay the same from job to job.
Allrounders bring each role up to a solid standard and keep it there. They can judge what a piece of work needs, and once it has that, they move their attention on.
The colleagues who watched an Allrounder take on job after job know what that range is worth. A stranger reading the CV sees a list of unrelated posts, so the range counts for most among the people who saw it.
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 Rooted career stays in one recognisable world, such as one sector, one profession or one city's cultural life. The people, the rules and the habits of that world stay familiar from role to role.
At the other end, a Widespread career moves between very different worlds.
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 role at a time, each done well, without seeking mastery
A cashier moves to the mortgage team, then to compliance, then to running the bank’s branches across the region. Each move takes her into work she has not done before, inside a bank she knows from the counter up. In her second year in charge, the branches stopped losing staff to the bank’s rivals.
A florist who works for herself closes her flower stall to photograph weddings full time, then puts the camera down to plan whole weddings for couples, then takes the lease on a barn and runs it as a venue. In its first year the venue filled up through couples and suppliers who knew her from the flowers and the photographs.
A meter reader moves to the customer call centre, then to planning the company’s roadworks, then to running one of its depots. In one company and one region, he has come to know its customers from the phone, its streets from the roadworks plans and its crews from the depot yard. The depot he runs now fixes a burst main in a day where it used to take two.
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 Allrounder career.
They like to explore what they do not know, even when it feels risky.
They seldom go looking for contacts outside their usual circle, and networking events are not for them.
Their goals centre on doing well more than on learning something new.
Having several projects running at once does not suit them.
Every Allrounder 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
VRCSO, O for owned
A Self-Led Allrounder picks the next role and goes after it. Sometimes that is a gap nobody else would fill, and just as often it is a post plenty of people wanted, which the Allrounder asked for and won. They take each role to make it run well, and once it does, they look around the same world for the next. Over the years that world comes to know them as someone who makes things work, and that reputation opens doors that stay shut to a stranger.
Every move is also the Allrounder’s own risk. Nobody plans the next step for them, so finding it takes asking, watching for openings and some luck, and a role that looked good from a distance may suit them less than they hoped. The best protection is knowing what each next role is meant to add.
Katharine Stewart, a Self-Led AllrounderKatharine Stewart moved to a small farm, a croft, at Abriachan, above Loch Ness, with her husband and daughter after the war, and began writing about their life there for the money it brought in. She trained as a teacher and taught at the small school in Abriachan for over a decade. Widowed, she took over the post office and, unasked, added a library and the running of local elections. She stayed in that one Highland community for more than sixty years. A Self-Led Allrounder (VRCS-O).
VRCSG, G for guided
A Guided Allrounder’s roles come to them. A council moves them from parks to licensing, a bank rotates them through its branches and its back office, an army posts them from logistics to training to recruitment, and the Allrounder learns each new job and runs it well. That brings training, a steady income and a view of the whole organisation from several of its desks, without hunting for each next job alone. The people choosing the next posting have watched them work for years, and pick them because they know the job will get done.
The organisation also decides the order. A posting can end just as the role starts to feel like theirs, and the next one may suit the organisation better than it suits the Allrounder or their household. A reorganisation or a new boss can stall the whole run of moves. A Guided Allrounder gains by saying which postings they want, and why.
Mary Bryan, a Guided AllrounderMary Bryan applied to the City of Tampa and to Busch Gardens on the same day at eighteen, and the city rang first. She stayed sixty-three years, moving from housing to building inspection, then to planning, the city’s legal office and finally a councillor’s office as an aide, under eleven mayors along the way. The city credits her institutional knowledge with shaping generations of its local government. A Guided Allrounder (VRCS-G).
Marta Ortega is the daughter of Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex, the company behind Zara. She joined the family firm the year she graduated, as a sales assistant in a Zara store in London, and stocked shelves without telling anyone whose daughter she was. Then came months each in finance, accounting, sales analysis and design, and a spell running Zara’s image. Later the board, on her father’s proposal, made her chair of the group whose shelves she had once stocked. A Guided Allrounder (VRCS-G).
Günther Oettinger spent most of his working life in German and European government. He led his party’s group in the parliament of Baden-Württemberg for fourteen years, then the state’s government. From there Angela Merkel sent him to Brussels as a European Commissioner. There he held three very different portfolios in turn. First came energy, then the digital economy, a field new to him, and then the budget and the Commission’s staff. A Guided Allrounder (VRCS-G).
Mary Portas started out dressing windows at Harrods, ran display at Topshop and became creative director of Harvey Nichols, sitting on its board by thirty. She then left to found her own agency, Yellowdoor. Retail stayed her world all along, and the job inside it kept changing. A Self-Led Allrounder (VRCS-O).
Yogie Naidoo joined Drakewoods, a tool merchant in Pietermaritzburg, as a storeman, at a time when apartheid law kept him to a separate toilet, and when for a while his office was a box and a crate. He learned thousands of stock codes by heart, drove the delivery van, then moved into sales, where managers came to him for what the stock could do. Unable to get a loan, he bought the firm from its owners, paying them a share of its takings for twenty years. A Self-Led Allrounder (VRCS-O).
Katharine Stewart moved to a small farm, a croft, at Abriachan, above Loch Ness, with her husband and daughter after the war, and began writing about their life there for the money it brought in. She trained as a teacher and taught at the small school in Abriachan for over a decade. Widowed, she took over the post office and, unasked, added a library and the running of local elections. She stayed in that one Highland community for more than sixty years. A Self-Led Allrounder (VRCS-O).
Mary Bryan applied to the City of Tampa and to Busch Gardens on the same day at eighteen, and the city rang first. She stayed sixty-three years, moving from housing to building inspection, then to planning, the city’s legal office and finally a councillor’s office as an aide, under eleven mayors along the way. The city credits her institutional knowledge with shaping generations of its local government. A Guided Allrounder (VRCS-G).
At work, an Allrounder is the colleague who has done the job next door, and the one next to that.
Having moved between very different kinds of work, Allrounders can point a colleague toward work that might suit them better.
They know why things are as they are, and what was tried before.
They judge how good the work has to be, and deliver that.
A useful contact, idea or chance they come across goes to their one commitment, with nothing else competing for it.
Because an Allrounder can do more than one kind of work, they can become the place’s fixer, handed whichever job is missing. Over the years the gaps can start choosing the career for them, unless they guard the work they would have picked. It shows when a colleague leaves and the Allrounder is the one moved to the empty desk, or in a reorganisation, when they are posted to whatever was left uncovered.
Allrounder careers need worlds with many different jobs in them and room to move between those jobs without leaving. Both variants turn up in most of these worlds. An army or a police force leans Guided, a village or a family business leans Self-Led, and a council or a school can go either way.
Housing, planning, finance, the chief executive’s office
Shop, post office, school, village hall
Storeroom, deliveries, sales, running the firm
Groundsman, bar and functions, membership, club secretary
Teaching assistant, school office, exams officer, business manager
Logistics, training, operations, recruitment
Kitchen, front desk, sales, general manager
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits an Allrounder.
The word the type takes its name from. In ordinary speech it covers anyone good at many things, in any career. Here it names one career type, which does very different jobs well, one at a time, without leaving its world.
Very different roles, each done solidly, none taken deep, which fits an Allrounder and the other careers that do many things well without mastering one. The full saying runs jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.
What colleagues call the person trusted to take over a job, because they will not drop it.
This site keeps the word for the Generalists, the family that changes both the work and the world, so an Allrounder, who keeps to one world, is not one of them. In everyday speech the word fits an Allrounder too. VWThe Generalists
The sports word for a player who can fill several positions and is sent to whichever the team needs. It fits an Allrounder closely.
Used when the whole career runs inside a single employer and the roles change along the way, as Mary Bryan’s did.
An Allrounder career grows by taking the next role, and every new role is a fresh start in a familiar place. That moment decides whether the range keeps adding up or starts to look like drifting, and it is where most of the costs land.
A short note on each role, what it was and what changed while the Allrounder held it, lets an outsider see the range. A few contacts outside their world help too, so a recruiter sees more than someone from one place.
Before saying yes to a very different role, an Allrounder can agree with the new manager how long they have to learn it, and when pay and title catch up. That turns the reset into a plan.
A skill, a circle or an interest outside the job means a bad spell in one role is not a bad spell in everything.
If the business is shrinking, the council is merging departments or the culture has soured, the next role may not last. What an Allrounder knows of the place is worth most while it stands, so a move inside it stops being the safe choice.
A skill the place cannot easily find elsewhere, kept up to date, makes an Allrounder harder to replace when budgets are cut.
| The skill |  Varied |  Rooted |  Competence |  Serial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Learning agility Getting from new to solid in a very different role fast, so each reset is short. VC | Serves Varied | Serves Competence | ||
| Contextual intelligence Knowing who decides what in the place and why things are done as they are, and using it to settle into each new job. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Career design Choosing each next role for what it adds, so a run of very different jobs builds toward something the Allrounder wanted. VS | Serves Varied | Serves Serial | ||
| Making work visible Leaving a record of each role and what changed in it, so the range can be seen outside the one world. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Seeing change coming Noticing early when the place is shrinking, merging or souring, and moving before it decides for them. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Knowing when to quit Telling when a role is running well and can be handed over, and when the next one will teach more than staying. CS | Serves Competence | Serves Serial |
Many Allrounder careers begin with one kind of work. From here an Allrounder career can change in three directions, each a different career rather than a step up.
One kind of work in one world, done well, one post after another. It turns into an Allrounder career the first time the Perennial takes on a very different kind of work in the same place, offered or sought.
VRCSAn Allrounder has done very different jobs well in one world. That experience stays theirs whatever the career does next, and a break from work takes none of it away.
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Coming soon
The AllrounderThe 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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