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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, towards mastery, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Diver 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, one at a time.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Reinventor 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, one at a time.
Competence instead of Mastery The Allrounder 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, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Octopus 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, towards mastery, one at a time.
Focused instead of Varied The Diver 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, one at a time.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Reinventor 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, one at a time.
Competence instead of Mastery The Allrounder 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, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Octopus 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, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Steward'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, one at a time.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Steward'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 StewardThe 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 Steward
One of the Locals, the family of careers that stay in similar environments
Very different roles, in one world, taken one after another, with a drive for mastery. (VRMS)
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In everyday English, a steward is the person trusted to look after a household, an estate or an institution for the long term. They are one of its anchors. Over the years they take on whichever part of it needs them next, one part at a time, and leave each part better run than they found it.
Coming soon
The StewardThe 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 Steward (VRMS) knows one world from every side and, over the years, becomes one of the people it relies on most.
The roles change, sometimes completely, often because the place needs someone in a new role and the Steward takes it on. Their world, their work environment, stays the same, so what the Steward learns about its people, its history and its unwritten rules carries over into the next role.
A chemistry teacher who became head of year, then ran the school’s finances, then became its head, all at one school, has not started over each time. Each move gave a new view of the same school. The one world need not be a single employer, though. It can as well be a town, an industry or a profession, as long as its people and its rules stay familiar.
Stewards also push for mastery. They keep improving how the work is done after it is already done well, and in at least one area they become the person colleagues come to for answers.
That combination takes years to build, and it is built in one world. A Steward’s range and depth are worth most inside the world that saw them grow, and noticeably less 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 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.
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, with a push for mastery
A nurse spends her first years on the wards, then runs a ward, then moves into the hospital’s finance team, then leads its patient safety programme. The checklists she introduced as a ward manager are still in use after she has moved on.
A freelance stage manager starts taking on lighting design for the small companies she already works with, then sets up her own production company, then launches a festival for the city’s independent theatre. No employer offered her any of it. Each role came from people she had worked beside for years and from a gap she saw in the one scene she knew best.
An engineer at a car maker moves to a supplier’s sales team, then to an industry standards body, then back to a car maker to run its quality function. He has had four employers in one industry, and a reputation for knowing how every part of it works.
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 Steward career.
They seek out experiences radically different from the ones they are used to.
Meeting people from many walks of life does little to give them energy.
They set goals around learning something, not only around winning.
Doing one thing for a long time seldom bores them.
Every Steward 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
VRMSO, O for owned
A Self-Led Steward goes and gets their roles. Nobody hands them the next job, so they look for it, ask for it or create it, often before anyone knew it was needed, and sometimes where there is no organisation at all, only a field, a scene or a trade. The world stays the same, but the path through it is the Steward’s own design, which is why these careers often include roles that did not exist until the Steward made them.
Nothing arrives on its own, though. Each move has to be found, argued for and sometimes invented, and no institution is committed to the next step. Self-chosen moves also lead to more dead ends, because a role that looked promising from outside can turn out to be worth less than expected, and nobody else checked it first. What helps most is a reputation in the world strong enough that the next opportunity comes looking for the Steward.
Emma Rice, a Self-Led StewardEmma Rice has spent her working life in British theatre. She started as an actor with the Cornish company Kneehigh, began directing its productions and went on to run it jointly. She then applied for and won the artistic directorship of Shakespeare’s Globe. When the Globe’s board narrowed what she could do there, she left and founded her own company, Wise Children. Her direction of Brief Encounter won an Olivier Award. A Self-Led Steward (VRMS-O).
VRMSG, G for guided
A Guided Steward’s roles are offered. The organisation, the profession or the institution moves the Steward from role to role, promoting them, moving them to new posts and rotating them through its departments, often because it is preparing them to lead through a talent programme or a succession plan. That brings training, backing and a route to places no individual reaches alone. The top of a large organisation is often reached through the roles it offers, and the organisation itself often promotes a Guided Steward step by step along that route.
However, the whole career then rests on one institution. The roles arrive on its timetable and in its order, and the career depends on the organisation continuing to exist and continuing to want the Steward. Companies are taken over, sectors shrink, and an organisation can decide that a role, or a person, is no longer needed. A Guided Steward does well to keep part of what they know useful outside the organisation, so that the career can outlive it if it has to.
Mary Barra, a Guided StewardMary Barra joined General Motors at eighteen as a student on a work-study programme and has worked nowhere else. She went through engineering, ran a plant, led human resources and then product development, and became the company’s chief executive. Every role was an offer from the company. A Guided Steward (VRMS-G).
Graham Beale trained as an accountant and joined Anglia Building Society’s internal audit team, which became part of Nationwide through a merger. He went on to run a Nationwide subsidiary, lead its commercial division, become group finance director and then chief executive, a post he held for nine years, in which he led the largest merger among Britain’s building societies. A Guided Steward (VRMS-G).
Luiza Trajano started in her aunt’s shop in Franca at twelve, earning Christmas money. At seventeen she joined Magazine Luiza for good and worked as a saleswoman, a store manager, a supervisor and then a buyer, taking a law degree she did not use. Then her aunt sent her a note saying it was time to lead. She built the family shop into a chain of more than a thousand stores. A Guided Steward (VRMS-G).
Burt Rutan spent his working life in aircraft and spacecraft design without climbing any one company’s ladder. He tested aircraft for the air force, worked for a small aircraft maker, then left to found his own design company, and later a second one, Scaled Composites, to build prototypes nobody had commissioned. There he designed Voyager and SpaceShipOne, which won him the Ansari X Prize and two Collier Trophies. A Self-Led Steward (VRMS-O).
Gisela Mac Laren started as a clerk in her family’s shipyard in Niterói, Brazil, at fifteen, when she dreamed of being a singer. At twenty-one she left an economics degree in the United States, against her father’s wishes, to help rescue the yard from bankruptcy protection. She spent about ten years as a director seeing it through, then became its president, the first woman to head a Brazilian shipyard, and the yard went on to build modules for oil platforms. A Self-Led Steward (VRMS-O).
Emma Rice has spent her working life in British theatre. She started as an actor with the Cornish company Kneehigh, began directing its productions and went on to run it jointly. She then applied for and won the artistic directorship of Shakespeare’s Globe. When the Globe’s board narrowed what she could do there, she left and founded her own company, Wise Children. Her direction of Brief Encounter won an Olivier Award. A Self-Led Steward (VRMS-O).
Mary Barra joined General Motors at eighteen as a student on a work-study programme and has worked nowhere else. She went through engineering, ran a plant, led human resources and then product development, and became the company’s chief executive. Every role was an offer from the company. A Guided Steward (VRMS-G).
At work, a Steward is the person who has done the other jobs.
Having done several kinds of work, Stewards see what a problem looks like to each trade involved.
They can show the people they train what only long practice teaches.
One commitment means nobody wonders whose side they are on.
They grow the place’s own ways further, rather than importing someone else’s.
Having worked in so many parts of the place, a Steward can seem to belong to none of them. Each department may see them as another’s, and trust them a little less for it. It shows when they take over a team, or argue one department’s case to the rest.
Steward careers grow in worlds large enough to hold very different roles and stable enough to reward staying. The same world can hold a Guided Steward and a Self-Led one. A civil service tends toward the first, a city’s cultural life toward the second, and most worlds hold both.
Engineering, operations, people, strategy, leadership
Clinician, manager, finance, medical director
Researcher, teacher, head of department, dean
Case work, policy, finance, heading a directorate
Technical specialist, account lead, product owner, industry body
Performer, lighting designer, producer, festival director
Shop floor, sales, finance, running the business
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits a Steward.
Very different roles, with one taken especially deep, like the wide top and single deep stroke of a T.
Two or more roles taken deep, like the teeth of a comb.
On this site the Generalists are the family with breadth in both roles and worlds, so a Steward is not one. In everyday use, many people would call a Steward a generalist. VWThe Generalists
On this site the Polymath is a different type, across very different roles and worlds at once. In everyday use, a Steward who excels in several fields gets called one too. VWMPThe Polymath
On this site the Allrounder is the type without the push for mastery. In everyday use, the word covers Stewards as well. VRCSThe Allrounder
When the one world is a single employer.
When a Steward ends up running the place.
A Steward career moves forward one role at a time, and each change of role is where it gains or loses the most. Most of its costs land at that moment, and most of them can be softened by how the move is made.
Writing, teaching, a network outside the organisation and qualifications that travel make a Steward’s record visible beyond one world, so the proof goes with them if they ever leave it.
With no second commitment to cushion a switch, a short stretch of parallel work helps, at the end of one role or the start of the next, through conversations, a spell in another team or a small project on the side, so the new work shows its downsides before the move.
Everything a Steward builds is invested in one world, so before the next move it is worth asking whether that world can still support them and their ambitions, and whether it is still the one to stay in.
Mastery pays late, so a Steward who moves on before a role rewards the effort leaves the premium behind. Staying in at least one role until they reach the standard they are after is what turns the years into standing.
A committee, a short project beside the main role or a spell covering for a colleague keeps a Steward practised for the weeks when several things land at once.
| The skill |  Varied |  Rooted |  Mastery |  Serial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Learning agility Getting good at a very different role quickly, which every move in a Steward career asks for. V | Serves Varied | |||
| Contextual intelligence Reading how a place really works, its people, its history and its unwritten rules, and putting that to use in each new role. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Analogical reasoning Carrying what worked in one department into another, where nobody has thought to try it. V | Serves Varied | |||
| Deliberate practice Setting up the practice that keeps a role improving after it is already done well. M | Serves Mastery | |||
| Political acumen Building the standing inside one world that brings the next role, whether it is offered or asked for. VR | Serves Varied | Serves Rooted | ||
| Knowing when to quit Judging when a role, or the world itself, has given what it can, and moving before staying costs too much. RS | Serves Rooted | Serves Serial |
Many Steward careers start narrower, and a Steward who wants the career to grow further has two next steps.
One kind of work taken ever deeper in one world. It becomes a Steward career when a very different role follows in the same place.
The same range in one world, each role done well. It becomes a Steward career once the push for mastery starts.
VRMSA Steward has worked in a variety of roles and pursued mastery along the way. Nobody can take that away, and a career break does not undo it either.
Both at once, across worlds and at the same time, leads toward the PolymathVWMP
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Coming soon
The StewardThe 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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