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Your result
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, several at once.
Focused instead of Varied The Shepherd 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, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Mender 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, several at once.
Mastery instead of Competence The Octopus 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, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Allrounder gives one commitment its full attention at a time. You mostly hold several commitments at once. Putting everything into one for a while might be worth trying.
Similar roles, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Focused instead of Varied The Shepherd 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, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Mender 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, several at once.
Mastery instead of Competence The Octopus 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, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Allrounder gives one commitment its full attention at a time. You mostly hold several commitments at once. Putting everything into one for a while might be worth trying.
Very different roles, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Keystone'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, several at once.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Keystone'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 KeystoneThe 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 Keystone
One of the Locals, the family of careers that stay in similar environments
Very different roles, in one world, held several at a time, each done well. (VRCP)
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In everyday English, a keystone is the wedge-shaped stone at the top of an arch. Masons set it last, and it locks the stones on either side into place, so the arch can carry weight. The word also means the part everything else depends on. A Keystone becomes that for the world they work in, by holding several very different roles at once and keeping each in good order.
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The KeystoneThe 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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Our signup is not answering just now. This opens the newsletter's own signup page, with your address filled in.
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A Keystone (VRCP) holds several very different roles at the same time, all in one world, and does each of them well. Over the years, that world comes to rely on them for all of those roles at once.
The roles run side by side, and they have little in common. They all sit in one world, their work environment, so the people a Keystone meets in one role are often the people they serve in another. The parent met at the school gate on Monday may be across the council table on Wednesday.
In a regional orchestra, a cellist who also runs its programme for schools and represents the players on its board holds three roles in one building, every season. Each role can sit under a different employer, or under none, and it is still one world, because the same people turn up in all of them, whether the world is a town, a trade or a church community.
Keystones take each role to a solid standard and hold it there, and put the energy that polishing one role would take into keeping the others running. That is how three or four very different commitments stay in good order at once.
All of that grows up in one world, and it is worth most there. No single job title covers what a Keystone does, which makes them hard to replace inside their world and harder to explain outside 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.
A Parallel career holds several commitments at once, such as a job, a practice and a seat on a board. Each keeps running while the others do.
At the other end, a Serial career holds one commitment at a time.
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
Several roles at once, each done well
An engineer writes code for the company’s main product three days a week, takes her turn on the support desk and sits on the staff council. When the largest customer threatened to leave over a fault, she was the one person who knew the code, the complaint and the people on both sides. The fault was fixed within the week, and the customer renewed.
A skipper who owns her boat also keeps the books for the harbour’s fishing association and runs the fish auction on market mornings. When the auction moved into a new hall, the harbour board asked her to plan the move, because she knew the auction from the boat, from the auctioneer’s desk and from the books. The boats landed their catch in the new hall the same day the old one closed.
A lecturer teaches first-year statistics, draws up his department’s timetable and speaks for his colleagues on the staff union’s branch committee. When two departments merged, the new department adopted his timetable, and the agreement he helped negotiate kept every teaching post.
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 a Keystone career.
They are more excited by a new idea than by one they already know.
Being known for a diverse set of connections matters little to them.
Pushing their abilities to a higher level is not what they look for in a task.
They like having more than one project going at the same time.
Every Keystone 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
VRCPO, O for owned
A Self-Led Keystone puts their own mix of roles together. They join the parish council, coach the youth team or start the town’s Saturday market beside their own shop because they choose to, and some of their roles exist only because they started them. No single employer holds all of it, so no single boss can take it away, and a role that ends leaves the others standing. Over the years the mix becomes a fair picture of what they care about in their world.
Every role in it is also theirs to carry. Nobody else decides when there are enough roles, so the load grows one yes at a time, and a role taken on out of goodwill can prove the hardest to put down. Nobody pays for the training either, and whatever they start begins without a budget or a team. It helps to bring others in early, so that a role they started can one day run without them.
Yamila Acedo, a Self-Led KeystoneYamila Acedo taught at the secondary school in Alcaraz, a small town in Argentina’s Entre Ríos province, and for eight years also ran the town’s social-development office, working closely with its residents. A few years later she also joined the volunteer fire brigade in nearby Bovril, then stood for election and became Alcaraz’s first woman mayor. She still turns out to fires with the crew. A Self-Led Keystone (VRCP-O).
VRCPG, G for guided
A Guided Keystone’s roles are handed to them, often because they already hold several things together well. The head teacher asks a class teacher to run the school trips as well, the firm adds the payroll to the warehouse manager’s job, the town asks the person who already keeps the football club’s accounts to be its treasurer. Each role arrives with its people, its budget and its history in place, and the people handing it over have watched the Keystone work for years, so the trust is earned before the role begins.
The roles also arrive on the place’s timetable. Saying no to people who rely on them is hard, new roles arrive faster than old ones are handed back, and an institution that has backed them can come to expect their evenings and their loyalty as well. A Guided Keystone gains from telling the people who hand out roles which ones they would most like to hold, so the next offer fits the person as well as the gap.
Elsie Eiler, a Guided KeystoneElsie Eiler and her husband Rudy bought the tavern in Monowi, Nebraska, and as the town’s population fell, she also became its secretary and treasurer. When Rudy died, she was left as Monowi’s only resident, which made her its mayor and clerk as well. She cooks and pours in the tavern, issues her own liquor licence and keeps the town’s four streetlights funded. Next door she opened Rudy’s Library, built from his collection of thousands of books. A Guided Keystone (VRCP-G).
Ömer Aslan lived for about twenty years in Bingöl, a village in the Eruh district of Turkey’s Siirt province, farming its land and keeping up its two-hundred-year-old mill. When the other households had gone, he became its imam, leading the prayers, and its muhtar, the headman who handles every official paper. On his own petition the state built the village a mosque, and he has since asked for the ruined church beside it to be restored. A Guided Keystone (VRCP-G).
Bob Morrow spent decades as one of the two dentists in Walsh, Colorado, a town of about seven hundred people. Over the years the town has also had him as its fire chief and its mayor. When a national radio programme visited, he was sitting on the city council and serving as county coroner while still running his dental practice. A Guided Keystone (VRCP-G).
Michael Eavis was training for the merchant navy at nineteen when his father died and left him the family dairy farm at Pilton, in Somerset. At thirty-four, after seeing Led Zeppelin play at the Bath festival, he held his own festival on the farm, which grew into Glastonbury. He has run the festival and the dairy herd side by side for more than fifty years, and gave farmland for homes that local families rent. A Self-Led Keystone (VRCP-O).
Jorge Vargas Roca studied philosophy as a seminarian before going home to Bolivia’s Chiquitania to raise cattle in San Rafael de Velasco, where he also represents the Santa Cruz livestock federation. When wildfires reached his own land, he joined a volunteer fire brigade, and two years later he also became the town’s mayor. In the region’s worst fire season in years, he led the fight against the fires in his municipality as both incident commander and mayor. A Self-Led Keystone (VRCP-O).
Yamila Acedo taught at the secondary school in Alcaraz, a small town in Argentina’s Entre Ríos province, and for eight years also ran the town’s social-development office, working closely with its residents. A few years later she also joined the volunteer fire brigade in nearby Bovril, then stood for election and became Alcaraz’s first woman mayor. She still turns out to fires with the crew. A Self-Led Keystone (VRCP-O).
Elsie Eiler and her husband Rudy bought the tavern in Monowi, Nebraska, and as the town’s population fell, she also became its secretary and treasurer. When Rudy died, she was left as Monowi’s only resident, which made her its mayor and clerk as well. She cooks and pours in the tavern, issues her own liquor licence and keeps the town’s four streetlights funded. Next door she opened Rudy’s Library, built from his collection of thousands of books. A Guided Keystone (VRCP-G).
At work, a Keystone is the person several parts of the place lean on at once.
Having done several kinds of work, Keystones see what a problem looks like to each trade involved.
They know the rules nobody writes down, so they are less often caught out.
The level they work at is the one newcomers are aiming for, so they can show how to reach it.
Something that works in one of their roles can be tried in another while they still hold both.
A Keystone belongs to several teams and is with each of them only part of the time. Colleagues learn to share them and quietly plan around the days they are elsewhere, so decisions can get made without them. It shows in the meeting held on the afternoon they are known to be out.
Keystone careers grow wherever one person can hold a second role beside the first, and then a third. They turn up in large organisations and small towns alike. A firm tends to hand its Keystones their roles, a village tends to see them take their own, and plenty of worlds hold both.
Radiographer, fire warden, staff representative
Class teacher, special needs coordinator, the school’s website
Lay reader, treasurer, youth leader
Tenant, board secretary, caretaker
Ski instructor, lift operator, mountain rescue
Keeper, education talks, the volunteers’ rota
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits a Keystone.
Several roles at once, each with its own hat.
The pin that keeps a wheel on its axle, and the person the rest depends on, much the same image as the keystone.
Very different roles, each done well, none taken deep, and a Keystone holds its trades at the same time.
On this site it points most often to two types. A portfolio held in one world is a Keystone’s, and the same mix across very different worlds is the Mender’s. VWCPThe Mender
On this site the Generalists are the family with breadth in both roles and worlds, so a Keystone is not one. In everyday use, many people would call a Keystone a generalist. VWThe Generalists
On this site the Allrounder is the type that holds its roles one at a time. In everyday use, the word covers Keystones as well. VRCSThe Allrounder
A Keystone career changes each time a role is added or put down while the others keep running. Those moments decide whether the week stays manageable, and most of the costs can be eased by how the change is made.
A single page listing each role, who it served and one result, written for a stranger, lets the mix be explained outside the one world that saw it grow.
Before taking on another role, it pays to ask whether any of their roles could lead to a senior post, and to make that role’s results plain to the people who fill such posts, so the top jobs are not lost by default.
Agreeing, when a new role arrives, which older one goes or shrinks keeps the number of deadlines manageable, and giving each role its own fixed days cuts the time lost to switching.
A new role means months of working things out. Adding it in a quiet season, and waiting until it runs on habit before taking on another, keeps most of the week on ground the Keystone already knows.
Each new role ties a Keystone more tightly to one world. If the town is shrinking or the boss is the problem, the next role deepens the hold of a place they may soon want to leave.
| The skill |  Varied |  Rooted |  Competence |  Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Learning agility Reaching a sound standard in a very different role quickly, while the roles already held keep running. VC | Serves Varied | Serves Competence | ||
| Cognitive load management Keeping several unrelated roles in mind at once, so that nothing is dropped in a crowded week. P | Serves Parallel | |||
| Analogical reasoning Seeing that a problem met in one role has been solved in another, and using the answer while both roles are still running. VP | Serves Varied | Serves Parallel | ||
| Contextual intelligence Knowing who decides what in one world, so each role is done the way the place actually works. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Political acumen Saying yes and no inside one world in ways that keep the trust of every side the Keystone serves. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Knowing when to quit Choosing which role to hand on when a new one arrives, before the rest start to slip. P | Serves Parallel |
Many Keystone careers begin with fewer roles or narrower ones, and two directions lead on from here.
Several commitments at once in one world, all of one kind of work. It becomes a Keystone career when a very different role joins them.
Very different roles in a single world, taken one at a time. It becomes a Keystone career once a second role is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
VRCPA Keystone has held several very different roles at once and kept each of them in good order. That stays theirs, whatever roles they later put down, and a career break leaves it intact.
Both at once, across worlds and with the push for mastery, leads toward the PolymathVWMP
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Coming soon
The KeystoneThe 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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