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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.
Very different roles, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Varied instead of Focused The Polymath moves between very different roles. Your roles so far have been fairly similar, but that can change: a role that asks for different know-how would be a start.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Banyan 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.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Amphibian 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.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Pilgrim 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, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Varied instead of Focused The Polymath moves between very different roles. Your roles so far have been fairly similar, but that can change: a role that asks for different know-how would be a start.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Banyan 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.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Amphibian 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.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Pilgrim 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, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Pollinator'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.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Pollinator'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.
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Your type in full: The Pollinator
One of the Voyagers, the family of careers that do one kind of work across very different environments
One kind of work, across very different worlds, held side by side, with a drive for mastery. (FWMP)
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In everyday English, a pollinator is an animal, most often a bee, that carries pollen from flower to flower so that each flower can bear fruit. A Pollinator career practises one kind of skilled work across several sharply different worlds at the same time, keeps raising the standard of that work, and carries what the Pollinator learns in each world to the others, much as a bee carries pollen.
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The PollinatorThe 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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A Pollinator (FWMP) takes one craft, meaning one kind of skilled work such as surgery, statistics or translation, to a high standard and practises that craft for two or more sharply different worlds side by side, so that each world gains from what the Pollinator learns in the others.
The craft runs unchanged through every post. Each of a Pollinator’s worlds, meaning the work environments a Pollinator works in, keeps its own people, rules and pace, and often its own language, and a Pollinator learns each world’s ways on arrival while the know-how is already at work. In the lists further down, trade is another word for the craft, a skilled line of work.
A translator from Spanish holds a staff post translating treaties for an international body in Geneva and, in the same months, translates novels under a standing contract with a London publisher. The two worlds seldom meet. The publisher wants a character’s voice to survive in English, and the international body wants every clause to mean exactly one thing in every language. The treaty work taught the translator to keep a list of terms and translate each term the same way every time, and the translator now keeps the same kind of list for the names, places and invented words of a long novel series.
Each of a Pollinator’s worlds sets a bar for the craft, and a Pollinator keeps working past the highest of those bars, often with an idea picked up in one of the other worlds.
A Pollinator’s craft is welcome in every world the craft reaches, and a Pollinator sees the work from more sides than one world alone can show.
A Focused career stays with one kind of work, such as nursing, carpentry or tax law. The know-how carries over from one role to the next, so each new role builds on the last.
At the other end, a Varied career takes on kinds of work that have little in common.
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 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 commitments at once, with a push for mastery
A senior statistician at a national statistics office also sits on the safety board of a vaccine trial and, under a separate contract, checks the crime figures a city’s police publish one day a month. At the statistics office the statistician worked out a method for households that skip survey questions, and kept refining the method well past what the office needed. The same method went into the board’s review of patients who missed their check-ups, the board could trust the early results, and the trial finished its safety review ahead of plan.
A self-employed mediator holds three standing appointments, on a council’s panel for separating parents, as the mediator for a housing association’s residents, and on the roster of a grain shippers’ association. From the parents’ panel the mediator brought the habit of asking each side, before any figures, what each side most fears losing. Two member firms of the shippers’ association, in a three-year quarrel over a lost cargo, agreed terms in two days, and the association now sends every dispute between members to the mediator first.
A lighting designer holds a part-time post lighting the productions of an opera house, a contract as lighting adviser to an art museum and a seat on a river city’s panel for lighting its bridges. At the opera house the designer learned to make a singer’s face readable from the back row with a few well-chosen angles of light. The museum took up the same approach and halved the number of lamps in its galleries with no painting any harder to see, and the city has asked the designer to relight three more bridges.
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 Pollinator career.
Experiences radically different from the ones they know are not what they go looking for.
They go looking for contacts outside their usual circle, and networking events suit them.
They set goals around learning something, not only around winning.
Doing just one thing for too long bores them.
Every Pollinator 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
FWMPO, O for owned
A Self-Led Pollinator goes and finds each world. The Pollinator answers a call for proposals, writes to an editor, bids for a contract or offers the craft to a field that has not yet used the craft. Few employers can offer a set of sharply different worlds, so a Self-Led Pollinator often assembles the mix from separate posts, clients and contracts, and decides which worlds belong in the mix.
A Self-Led Pollinator also has to persuade every world to let the craft in, and people in a new field may doubt that an outsider’s method suits the field. A Self-Led Pollinator plans the calendars of all the worlds alone, so when two worlds want the same week, settling the clash falls to the Pollinator, and a world that drops out is the Pollinator’s to replace. A Self-Led Pollinator who asks each new world for a small first piece of work, such as one review, one design or one case, lets that world see the craft before either side commits to more.
Shigeru Ban, a Self-Led PollinatorShigeru Ban set up his own architecture practice in Japan, known for buildings made from paper tubes and timber. After the conflict in Rwanda, Ban proposed paper-tube shelters for refugees to the UN refugee agency, which took him on as a consultant. After the Kobe earthquake Ban designed paper log houses, and beside the relief work he kept designing museums and houses, among them the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Ban went on to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. A Self-Led Pollinator (FWMP-O).
FWMPG, G for guided
A Guided Pollinator is asked into each new world. A partner organisation appoints the Pollinator to a post of its own for part of the week while the first post stays open, a ministry lends its economist to an international mission, or an invitation arrives to join a panel or a project in a field the Pollinator has not worked in. An offer often follows work that someone in one of the Pollinator’s worlds saw at close range, and the people who make the offer often introduce the Pollinator to the right people inside the new world as well.
Which worlds a Guided Pollinator holds depends on who asks, and when. Two offers can come in one season and none in the next, and an organisation that lends a Guided Pollinator to a partner can ask for the Pollinator back before the work with the partner is done. A Guided Pollinator can answer each offer with the days the Pollinator can give and the date the work would end, so the organisation that asks plans around the Pollinator’s other worlds from the start.
Susanna Mälkki, a Guided PollinatorSusanna Mälkki, a Finnish conductor, became music director of the Ensemble intercontemporain, a Paris ensemble devoted to new music, at the invitation of the composer Pierre Boulez. Later Mälkki was chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic in her home city and, in the same years, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. France made Mälkki a knight of the Légion d’honneur, and the Nordic Council gave her its Music Prize. A Guided Pollinator (FWMP-G).
Eugénia Cunha is a forensic anthropologist, a scientist who identifies people from their skeletons. From the late nineteen-nineties Cunha was a national consultant to Portugal’s institute of legal medicine, and from the early two-thousands she was also a full professor at the University of Coimbra. Alongside the institute and the university, Cunha worked on cases in East Timor and Mali. The American Academy of Forensic Sciences gave Cunha its T. Dale Stewart Award for her career’s work. A Pollinator (FWMP).
Julieta Fierro joined the Instituto de Astronomía of Mexico’s national university, UNAM, as a research assistant and became a full professor of astronomy. Beside the research post, Fierro took astronomy to television, to museums, where she created the astronomy section of the Museo Universum, and to children, in dozens of popular books. UNESCO gave Fierro its Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science, and the Mexican Academy of Language elected her a member. A Self-Led Pollinator (FWMP-O).
Tadashi Hattori graduated from Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine and became an eye surgeon in Japanese hospitals. A Vietnamese doctor whom Hattori had met at a meeting in Kyoto then invited Hattori to Hanoi. Since then, Hattori has divided each year between paid hospital surgery in Japan and free eye surgery in Vietnam, where Hattori has also trained more than thirty Vietnamese doctors. Hattori, one of Japan’s leading eye surgeons, received the Ramon Magsaysay Award. A Guided Pollinator (FWMP-G).
Shigeru Ban set up his own architecture practice in Japan, known for buildings made from paper tubes and timber. After the conflict in Rwanda, Ban proposed paper-tube shelters for refugees to the UN refugee agency, which took him on as a consultant. After the Kobe earthquake Ban designed paper log houses, and beside the relief work he kept designing museums and houses, among them the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Ban went on to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. A Self-Led Pollinator (FWMP-O).
Susanna Mälkki, a Finnish conductor, became music director of the Ensemble intercontemporain, a Paris ensemble devoted to new music, at the invitation of the composer Pierre Boulez. Later Mälkki was chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic in her home city and, in the same years, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. France made Mälkki a knight of the Légion d’honneur, and the Nordic Council gave her its Music Prize. A Guided Pollinator (FWMP-G).
At work, a Pollinator (FWMP) is the colleague who spends only part of the week in each world and still sets the standard for the craft in every one of those worlds.
Having learned more than one set of unwritten rules, Pollinators pick up the next one faster.
In their speciality they go after the difficult problems that others would rather pass on.
A club, a board and a business can each rely on them every week, without any needing all of their time.
They have seen much of what their trade can throw at them, so few problems in it are new.
A Pollinator spends only part of the week in each world, and in each world works mostly with the people the craft touches. The finance team, the sales team and the people who run the daily operation are seen less often, so a decision that is best for the craft can cost one of those teams more than a Pollinator expected. A Pollinator’s distance from finance, sales and the daily operation shows most when a Pollinator’s advice reaches the people who pay for that advice or carry that advice out, or when a Pollinator is asked to plan for a whole organisation.
Pollinator careers belong to kinds of work that many worlds need at a high standard and seldom need full time. The three worlds in each line below are held at the same time, through posts, contracts or seats that each world fills on its own.
A private surgical clinic, a surgical device maker’s testing laboratory, a ski federation’s medical team
A pension fund’s research team, a trade union’s advisory panel, a city council’s budget commission
An aircraft maker, a firm that builds racing bicycles, a dental implant laboratory
A law firm’s tax team, a charity’s free tax clinic, a professional body’s exam board
An elite sports academy, a children’s mental health service, a private practice
A news magazine’s staff post, a fashion house’s yearly contract, a national park’s wildlife survey
An advertising agency’s music unit, a video game studio’s sound team, a choir that commissions a new work each year
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits a Pollinator.
Said of a career that works in more than one country. Both words fit a Pollinator whose worlds are countries, and expat only while the Pollinator lives abroad. On this site a new country counts as a new world only when the people, rules and habits of the work change with the country, so very different worlds can also lie in one city.
In everyday use, a person known for one kind of work is called a specialist, and the word fits a Pollinator. On this site the Specialists are the family whose careers keep one kind of work within similar environments, so the Pollinator, whose worlds differ widely, belongs to the Voyagers. FRThe Specialists
A Pollinator’s portfolio is unusual, because every piece of the portfolio is the same craft, each piece placed in a different world. When a portfolio holds different kinds of work, the label points first, on this site, to the Keystone (VRCP) and the Mender (VWCP). VRCPThe Keystone VWCPThe Mender
Most choices in a Pollinator (FWMP) career are choices about worlds, which new world to take on, which world to let go, and how the week divides among the worlds kept. Each habit below answers one of the costs above, in the same order.
In any one of a Pollinator’s worlds, a seat on the committee that sets the craft’s standards, or the task of advising management on the craft’s part of each decision, gives a Pollinator a voice in how the organisation is run while the work stays the craft.
Before adding a world, a conversation with someone who worked in that world and moved on shows the bad sides that people still inside seldom mention.
A world that already trusts a Pollinator’s craft is the easiest place to try a neighbouring kind of work. A few weeks on loan to the team that uses the craft’s results, such as the planning team that depends on an economist’s forecasts, shows from inside which kinds of work beside the craft would welcome a Pollinator without a fresh start.
A few people who practise the same craft at the same level, in worlds where the Pollinator does not work, can test a judgement no rulebook covers, and a Pollinator can test the judgements of those peers in return.
As soon as a new world is agreed, a Pollinator can gather that world’s work into whole days or whole weeks, such as one week a month, and tell every other world, so the switches between worlds come a few times a month and not every day. When a Pollinator gives up a world, the same notice hands the freed time back to the worlds that remain.
| The skill |  Focused |  Widespread |  Mastery |  Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cultural intelligence Reading a new world's manners, pace and unwritten rules quickly enough for the craft to be heard in that world. W | Serves Widespread | |||
| Analogical reasoning Recognising which method from one world answers a question in another, and adapting the method before carrying it over. WP | Serves Widespread | Serves Parallel | ||
| Deliberate practice Setting the craft's next standard, and the practice that reaches it, beyond what any one world asks for. FM | Serves Focused | Serves Mastery | ||
| Translating between worlds Putting what one world's experts mean into words another world's people use, so a borrowed idea is accepted. W | Serves Widespread | |||
| Guarding attention Protecting long stretches of focus for the hardest work, whichever world that work belongs to. MP | Serves Mastery | Serves Parallel | ||
| Keeping a wide network Making a first acquaintance among strangers in a new world, and keeping in occasional touch afterwards, so that one world can lead to the next. WP | Serves Widespread | Serves Parallel |
Three neighbouring careers lead into a Pollinator (FWMP) career, and one wider career can follow a Pollinator career.
The same deep craft, practised in several posts at once inside one world. A Banyan career becomes a Pollinator career when the work moves into a very different world.
The same craft held in two or more sharply different worlds, each post done well. An Amphibian career becomes a Pollinator career once the push for mastery starts.
The same deep craft carried through very different worlds, one commitment at a time. A Pilgrim career becomes a Pollinator career once a second commitment is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
FWMPIn a Pollinator career, very different worlds draw on one craft at the same time, and the Pollinator becomes a link between worlds that would otherwise have little to do with each other.
The craft joined by very different kinds of work, still across very different worlds, held at once and pushed toward mastery.
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Coming soon
The PollinatorThe 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
