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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, towards mastery, several at once.
Focused instead of Varied The Banyan 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, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Polymath 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, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Keystone gets competent at many things instead of expert at one. You mostly keep going towards expert. Letting one area rest at competent, and spending that time on something new, is another way to go.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Steward 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, towards mastery, several at once.
Focused instead of Varied The Banyan 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, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Polymath 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, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Keystone gets competent at many things instead of expert at one. You mostly keep going towards expert. Letting one area rest at competent, and spending that time on something new, is another way to go.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Steward 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, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Octopus'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, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Octopus'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 OctopusThe 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 Octopus
One of the Locals, the family of careers that stay in similar environments
Very different roles, in one world, held side by side, with a drive for mastery. (VRMP)
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In everyday English, an octopus is the sea animal with eight arms. Most of its nerve cells sit in those arms, so each arm can feel, grip and work at something of its own while one body decides where they all go. It is also one of the cleverest animals in the sea, able to solve puzzles. The name fits a career whose very different roles each get real skill of their own, all steered by one mind that knows its world well.
Coming soon
The OctopusThe 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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An Octopus (VRMP) does several very different jobs in one world at the same time, and in at least one of them is among the best that world has.
The roles do not take turns, and each asks for its own way of working. Their world, their work environment, stays the same, so the people met in one role turn up in the others, and what one role teaches about the place makes the rest easier.
A winemaker who makes her family’s wine, chairs the village cooperative and lectures at the regional wine school does three very different jobs in one wine region, often in the same week. That is three organisations and still one world. What makes it one world is its people, its customs and its standards, not who pays the salary. So it can be a region, a trade or a city’s music scene as easily as a single firm.
Octopuses also push for mastery. In their deepest role they keep raising the standard long after the work is good enough, and the other roles often feed it. The winemaker’s students ask questions that send her back to the cellar with something new to try.
It is slow to build, and it needs a week guarded with care. The deepest role needs the longest, quietest stretches, and the other roles fit around it. It is also built in one world, so it is worth most where people have seen every part of it, and much less anywhere else.
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 Mastery career keeps pushing past good enough, in at least one area and often in several, whether or not anyone asks for it.
At the other end, a Competence career gets good enough and spends its energy elsewhere.
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, with a push for mastery
A curator looks after the museum’s insect collection, which other museums consult when they cannot name a specimen. He also runs the museum’s public galleries and edits its research journal. When a farmer brought in a beetle nobody could place, he named it as a new pest within a week, and the gallery had a display on it open before the next harvest.
A dairy farmer runs her family’s herd, makes a cheese the region’s best restaurants buy, and chairs the regional water board. Farming, cheesemaking and water policy have little in common, but she meets the same people at the market, at the cattle auction and around the board’s table. When the board had to choose which meadows to let flood in a wet winter, farmers who distrusted the board listened to her, because they knew her herd and her cheese.
A pianist leads the house band at the city’s best-known jazz club, runs a small record label for the musicians who play there and presents a weekly programme on local radio. She has learned all three among the same few hundred musicians. When she plays, the city’s other pianists come to listen, and the label and the programme both trade on that.
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 Octopus career.
They like to explore what they do not know, even when it feels risky.
Introducing people who might benefit from knowing each other is not something they go out of their way to do.
They enjoy tasks that push their abilities to a higher level.
Doing just one thing for too long bores them.
Every Octopus 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
VRMPO, O for owned
A Self-Led Octopus goes after their roles. They found the trade’s first prize, launch its journal or open a school for it beside the work they already do, and some of these roles exist only because they built them. Over the years the additions become the career’s signature, a combination of roles the person chose, and a name that belongs to them rather than to any employer.
A role they create starts bare, with no budget, colleagues or history until the Octopus supplies them, though the name they made in their other roles often comes with them. Nobody else decides what to drop, so that choice is theirs as well. A partner or a deputy to run each new venture day to day keeps the Octopus free for the deepest work.
Yotam Ottolenghi, a Self-Led OctopusYotam Ottolenghi trained as a pastry chef in London and met Sami Tamimi in the kitchen at Baker and Spice. With Tamimi and Noam Bar he opened the first Ottolenghi deli in Notting Hill, which grew into a group of delis and the restaurants NOPI and ROVI. Alongside the kitchens he took on a weekly column in The Guardian and wrote a run of cookbooks, among them Plenty and Jerusalem, which won a James Beard Award. A Self-Led Octopus (VRMP-O).
VRMPG, G for guided
A Guided Octopus is offered new roles because of how good they are at the ones they hold. The university gives its strongest researcher a department to run, a hospital asks its best surgeon onto its board, and a newspaper gives its leading reporter a desk to run. Each comes with money, staff and an institution that backs the Octopus and speaks up for them.
The offers come when the institution decides, and each is hard to refuse because it is an honour. Every new role takes hours from the work that earned it, and institutions rarely take one role away when they add another. All of these roles also rest on one institution’s judgement, so a reorganisation can remove several at once. A Guided Octopus does well to protect the role the others depend on, and to say so when the next offer comes.
Su Song, a Guided OctopusSu Song entered the civil service of China’s Song dynasty, in the eleventh century, through its examinations and spent his working life in it, rising to Minister of Justice and head of the Ministry of Personnel, and travelling as an envoy to the neighbouring Liao state. Alongside those posts he compiled an illustrated treatise on medicines, drew some of the oldest printed star maps and, on the emperor’s commission, built a water-driven astronomical clock tower forty feet high in the capital, Kaifeng. A Guided Octopus (VRMP-G).
Stephan Jantzen went to sea from Warnemünde, a port on Germany’s Baltic coast, as a cabin boy at fourteen, and became a captain who sailed around the world twice. Then the Rostock council chose him as Warnemünde’s pilot commander, in charge of bringing ships safely into the harbour, and he also took charge of the town’s lifeboat station. He held both posts together for the rest of his life, more than forty years, saving about a hundred people and receiving the rescue society’s highest medal. A Guided Octopus (VRMP-G).
Wendy Hall studied mathematics at the University of Southampton and came back to join its new computer science group. She became the university’s first woman professor of engineering, then head of its school of electronics and computer science, and is now its Regius Professor while directing the Web Science Institute she helped found. A Guided Octopus (VRMP-G).
Debbie Millman joined the New York branding firm Sterling Brands and over two decades became its president of design. Alongside the job, and still in New York’s design world, she became editorial and creative director of Print magazine, and started Design Matters, which became the first podcast about design and won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. With Steven Heller she also founded the world’s first graduate programme in branding, at the School of Visual Arts, which she chairs. A Self-Led Octopus (VRMP-O).
Francisco Javier Sicluna, Don Javier to his patients, was the family doctor of l’Alcúdia de Crespins, a small town in the province of Valencia, for more than twenty-five years, making house calls after lunch and staying on call around the clock, as rural medicine asks. For decades he combined the surgery with the town hall, winning the mayoralty at several elections. After he retired from medicine, the Valencia medical college and the provincial council named him their best rural doctor of the year. A Self-Led Octopus (VRMP-O).
Yotam Ottolenghi trained as a pastry chef in London and met Sami Tamimi in the kitchen at Baker and Spice. With Tamimi and Noam Bar he opened the first Ottolenghi deli in Notting Hill, which grew into a group of delis and the restaurants NOPI and ROVI. Alongside the kitchens he took on a weekly column in The Guardian and wrote a run of cookbooks, among them Plenty and Jerusalem, which won a James Beard Award. A Self-Led Octopus (VRMP-O).
Su Song entered the civil service of China’s Song dynasty, in the eleventh century, through its examinations and spent his working life in it, rising to Minister of Justice and head of the Ministry of Personnel, and travelling as an envoy to the neighbouring Liao state. Alongside those posts he compiled an illustrated treatise on medicines, drew some of the oldest printed star maps and, on the emperor’s commission, built a water-driven astronomical clock tower forty feet high in the capital, Kaifeng. A Guided Octopus (VRMP-G).
At work, an Octopus is the person who can be found in several rooms of the same building, and who knows what each room needs from the others.
When someone leaves or a team is short, Octopuses can step into more than one kind of work.
They hold their best work to a standard above what the job requires, and keep raising it.
A club, a board and a business can each rely on them every week, without any needing all of their time.
They know why things are as they are, and what was tried before.
An Octopus holds several roles at once, and those roles do not all want the same thing. The department they advise may be bidding against the one they run, or two of their commitments may be chasing the same client. It shows at budget time, when they speak for both sides of the same decision, and whenever colleagues have to ask which of their roles is speaking.
Octopus careers grow in worlds that hold very different kinds of work close together, where one person can belong to several at once. A university or a hospital tends to offer the new roles, which suits a Guided Octopus. A city’s food or music scene tends to leave them for the taking, which suits a Self-Led one, and many worlds offer both.
Research group, lecturing, head of department, the university’s research committee
Specialist clinic, a research trial, the hospital board
Family doctor, mayor, the town’s band
Editing a desk, writing a column, training the reporters
Head chef, a market stall, the food festival’s committee
Painter, gallery owner, the art school
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits an Octopus.
Several kinds of work along the top and one of them taken far down, like the crossbar and long stem of a T. Many Octopus careers begin with this shape.
Two or more deep roles on the same broad base, like the two legs of the Greek letter pi, or the teeth of a comb. An Octopus who masters a second role grows into this one.
Several different commitments at once. On this site it points most often to the Keystone, a portfolio held in one world with each part done well. With real depth in at least one part, the same portfolio is an Octopus’s. VRCPThe Keystone
On this site the Polymath is a different type, with several roles and depth across very different worlds at once. In everyday use, an Octopus who excels at several things gets the word as well. VWMPThe Polymath
On this site the Generalists are the family that changes its worlds as well as its work, which an Octopus does not. In everyday use, plenty of people would still call an Octopus a generalist. VWThe Generalists
An Octopus career changes most when a role is added or let go, and the deepest work has to keep its place through each change. Most of the career’s costs arrive at those moments, and the way each change is made decides how heavy they are.
Taking it first as a deputy, a co-lead or a single project lets the early mistakes happen in front of a few people, before the colleagues who know the Octopus as an expert watch them learn.
A single sentence can say what joins the roles, whether that is a subject, a group of people or the place they all serve. It turns a CV that reads as several careers into one, and is worth writing before any interview or panel and rewriting each time a role is added.
Each new role ties more of the career to one world. Before taking one on, an Octopus does well to ask whether that world is growing or shrinking, and to keep one role, qualification or contact that would still count somewhere else.
Raising the bar in every role at once is how a week runs out. Picking the one or two roles where mastery matters most, and holding the rest at a solid standard on purpose, sends the urge to improve where it pays.
A new commitment gets only part of an Octopus at first. Handing on an old role, or cutting its hours, before the new one starts gives the new work the attention it needs in its first months.
| The skill |  Varied |  Rooted |  Mastery |  Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliberate practice Keeping the deepest role improving year after year, with clear goals and honest feedback. M | Serves Mastery | |||
| Political acumen Keeping every side of one world willing to share the Octopus, so no role is taken away while the others grow. RP | Serves Rooted | Serves Parallel | ||
| Cognitive load management Holding several demanding roles in mind at once without letting the loudest crowd out the most important. P | Serves Parallel | |||
| Analogical reasoning Seeing that a problem in one role has the shape of one already solved in another, and carrying the answer across. VP | Serves Varied | Serves Parallel | ||
| Contextual intelligence Reading how the world's parts depend on each other, and using that to make each role help the others. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Knowing when to quit Letting go of a role that has given what it can, so the deepest one keeps its hours. MP | Serves Mastery | Serves Parallel |
Many Octopus careers start from a narrower one, and from here one step leads further.
One kind of work, taken deep and held as several commitments in one world. It becomes an Octopus career once one of those commitments is a very different kind of work.
The same several roles in one world, each done well. It becomes an Octopus career when at least one of those roles is pushed past good enough.
The same range and depth in one world, one role at a time. It becomes an Octopus career once a second role is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
VRMPAn Octopus has carried very different roles at the same time and taken at least one of them deep. That stays theirs through a change of roles, a step back or a career break.
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Coming soon
The OctopusThe 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.
Get early access (opens the newsletter signup page in a new tab)Free. You get the trait test first, plus the newsletter on the shape of careers. Leave any time. Privacy
