The Connector is among the most outgoing people of all. They want to interact with people as their equal to solve meaningful problems.
Social + Investigative (The Helper and The Thinker) – The Specialist
Descriptors: responsible, helpful, insightful, concerned, supportive, rational, tactful, understanding, perceptive, inquisitive, systematic, team player. Picture yourself as a School Psychologist.
The Specialist seeks a purposeful career, usually in a helping profession. They do not enjoy simply socializing with people but want to learn about them in a way that provides intellectual stimulation.
Social + Realistic (The Helper and The Doer) – The Trainer
Descriptors: coach, mentor, team player, social, doer, competitive, persistent, responsible, goal-oriented. Picture yourself as a Director of Recreation.
The Trainer likes to work with others as a team, promoting a sense of community for the common good.
If your second and third career types are scored within one or two percent of each other in your career test results, it’s possible that two career type options might be representative of you. The image below contains results from the 123 Career Test for a client who had a primary career interest type of Conventional (27%). However, notice how the client’s secondary and tertiary interest types (Social and Investigative) are tied at 20%.
Because of the second-place tie between Social and Investigative, my client had to consider which career type best represented her:
The Coordinator (Conventional/Social): The Organizer and The Helper—a person who likes to create structure and help others.
The Analyst (Conventional/Investigative): The Organizer and The Thinker—a person who enjoys creating structure and solving complex challenges and problems.
After reviewing the two different definitions, my client determined that the Conventional/Investigative career type, The Analyst, best explained her overall approach to work. However, because she enjoys mentoring and investing in people, she felt the Conventional/Social type, The Coordinator, best explained her from an interpersonal point of view.
Interestingly, this client is an introvert who loves creating and improving processes—very typical for a Conventional—but she also enjoys organizing events to bring people together, such as lunch and learns. This is atypical for a Conventional/Investigative, but characteristic of the Conventional/Social.
People are nuanced and complex!
In addition to your first two interest codes, pay attention to the last two codes in your six-letter chain. They are rank ordered. Therefore, the final two codes are your weakest career interest. For example, if an individual has a career code of IAECRS, the sixth code of S, Social, indicates a career in social services is not going to fit.
Another example is a person whose sixth code is C, Conventional. He or she should avoid careers that require strict rules, deadlines, and structure.
Use the space below to capture your thoughts about your career interest results and some of the descriptive words that you think accurately describe you. If you aren’t certain the results you received reflect you, I recommend taking the test again and comparing your results.
Capture your insights:
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In section two, “Blaze Your Path,” I will delve into using your career interest type to identify and research roles. I will also provide a more detailed overview of the O*NET Career Interest Profiler.
Before we begin the process of creating your personalized YouMap®, permit me to take a brief detour to recommend an additional assessment resource if you are a student or the parent of a student between the ages of 12 and 22, The SchoolPlace Big Five Profile™.
Calling All Students!
I first became certified in the SchoolPlace Big Five Profile™—as well as the adult version called The WorkPlace Big Five Profile™—back in 2012 and was recently certified as a Master Trainer in both.
Paradigm Personality Labs (formerly The Center for Applied Cognitive Studies) is the creator of the SchoolPlace Big Five Profile™ and describes it as follows:
“The SchoolPlace assessment and reports, formulated specifically for the academic environment, help students build self-awareness and understand their strengths and weaknesses as they relate to school and future careers. Students who are more in touch with themselves are better equipped to figure out which career paths are right for them.”
While the YouMap® is an effective tool for students, the SchoolPlace Big Five Profile™ assessment is an excellent supplement to the process because it provides additional insight into specific behavioral traits that younger adults and students might not be acutely aware of.
Increased self-awareness is one of the top predictors of career success, according to results of a 2006 study by Accenture, and another study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2003, “Predictors of success in the era of the boundaryless career.”
The SchoolPlace Big Five Profile™ measures five “super-traits” and twenty-three individual “sub-traits” based on the Five-Factor Model of personality and is backed by more than twenty years of psychological research.
The five super-traits and the corresponding sub-traits that describe school-related behavior are:
Need for Stability (N)
Explains how young people respond to and handle stressful situations
The sub-traits:
• Worry
• Temper
• Outlook
• Coping Level
Extroversion (E)
Explains the degree to which one enjoys being in the thick of the action
The sub-traits:
• Approach level
• Group orientation
• Pace
• Leadership
• Trust
• Tact
Originality (O)
Explains the degree to which one is open to new things
The sub-traits:
• Imagination
• Range of interests
• Innovation
• Zoom Scale (Level of detail-orientation)
Accommodation (A)
The degree to which someone accommodates others
The sub-traits:
• Service (to others)
• Compliance
• Humility
• Speaking out level
Consolidation (C)
Explains the degree to which one pushes toward goals
The sub-traits:
• Thoroughness
• Structure
• Ambition
• Concentration
• Methodicalness
Ian’s Story
I first met Ian and his father in 2015 when I was facilitating a career workshop in South Carolina for job seekers. After the workshop, Ian’s dad approached me and asked for my contact information.
Ian had spent the past year in culinary school and had recently dropped out of the program. His parents were perplexed because Ian loved to cook and was good at it. He often prepared new meal creations at home for his family.
What went wrong?
At that point, they were at a complete loss to understand how a role that fit both Ian’s interests and natural talents went wrong. I administered the assessment to Ian and met with him and his parents to review the results.
Four specific insights surfaced to explain why the culinary field was a poor fit for Ian:
• A need to always plan, rather than work spontaneously
• A tendency to concentrate and not multi-task
• High perfectionism
• A worrier who is sensitive to stress
Picture how Ian must have felt in a restaurant kitchen; a hectic environment that requires a thinking on the fly, multi-tasking, and is highly stressful. The environment at home was quite different because it was absent the stress or pressure to multi-task.
Ian ended up studying design, which matches his strengths, motivating skills, and interests but is more aligned with his behavioral tendencies. The last time I spoke to Ian’s father, he told me Ian was thriving and couldn’t be happier.
If you would like to increase your awareness of your behavioral tendencies, or you are the parent of a student, the SchoolPlace and WorkPlace Big Five Profile™ are excellent assessments to consider.
The YouMap® Career Profile
Once you’ve identified and confirmed your four pillars of career fulfillment (strengths, values, motivating skills and how your interests are wired) you will have a strong foundation for building your unique contribution statement, also known as your value proposition. Your value proposition will be the starting point to targeting your next step for your career in section two, “Blaze Your Path.”
In 2017, I collaborated with graphic designer and branding specialist, Crystal Davies, of Davies Designs, to create The YouMap®.
The YouMap® is a summarized report of your strengths, values, motivating skills, and career interests. YouMap® is also a one-page branding document that offers a place to include your unique contribution statement.
This branding document is an excellent resource you can use to compare opportunities against your strengths, values, skills, and interests. Equally important, it can be used as a powerful marketing tool to bring to a job interview. You bet interviewers will be impressed! (My clients say so.)
A sample one-page summary of the YouMap® career profile is shown here.
Create Your Own YouMap® Career Profile
Do you remember Anna, my accounting manager client I introduced at the beginning of the book? After we completed her YouMap®, it became clear that Anna was not in the wrong profession; she was in the wrong environment.
Many clients have contacted me ready to scrap their career and pivot in a new direction. You might find, like Anna did, that your greatest drivers of career dissatisfaction are not at the role level—they are at the manager or company level.
Specifically, Anna’s manager and workplace culture violated her value of continuous improvement because they were happy to ignore or patch up problems rather than fix them. She also had Developer as a strength—the natural mentor, trainer, coach, and teacher—yet her manager would tell her to stop spending time investing in people through mentoring and training. That was troubling to her.
I’m happy to report Anna found a better job! She wrote me an email saying, “Lots of values alignment at the new company. Yay! Thank you for helping me figure out what wasn’t working where I was and what I value!”
I first met Deana in 2013. She quit her job as a marketing manager without another job lined up and felt horribly guilty. She told me she felt she let her family down. She decided to get out of marketing after eight years. After working together, we identified her career dissatisfaction was unrelated to marketing. Rather, the problem was trying to lead marketing in her organization’s culture.
For starters, none of the executive leadership team were on the same page with their strategic marketing goals, which pulled Deana and her team in multiple directions. She had no Influencing strengths, so fighting to get her voice heard and constantly shielding her team from the resource conflict was stressful.
Additionally, she had Belief in her Top 5 strengths (strong core values that guide one’s life), and the organization participated in some less-than-honest business practices. The complete and utter violation of her core values that stemmed from her Belief strength made the situation untenable. She couldn’t stay. She was ready to throw eight years of experience out the window when she just needed to perform her role elsewhere.
Therefore, as you complete your own personalized YouMap®, remember to consider if your values and strengths could be leveraged somewhere else in the same field. However, if the skills of your job would be similar regardless of where you work, and you don’t enjoy doing them, a role change is in order.
Now, are you ready for the most exciting step of the “Find Yourself” section?
A simplified YouMap® template is provided as a download to allow you to enter the information from your assessments and exercises in each of the four discovery sections: strengths, values, motivated skills, and how you’re wired (personality-based career interests). Go to MyYouMap.com to download your own YouMap® template.
Enter your results into the YouMap® template as follows:
1.Add your Top 5 strengths from the Clifton StrengthsFinder into the first section of the template, “My Strengths.”
2.Enter your 5-10 prioritized values into the next section, “What I Value.”
3.List the skills you chose as motivating in the “Skills I Enjoy” section.
4.Enter your career interest type, and any words or phrases that describe you from the “Discover How You’re Wired” part of the book, into the “How I’m Wired” section of the YouMap®.
Finally, read through your profile and reflect on your unique attributes. What do you do better than other people? What are some of the insights you can harness to summarize what you do best? This is your unique value contribution.
To complete your YouMap®, take a few minutes to craft a statement for the “My Unique Contribution” section. Select words and phrases from your strengths, values, or from the “How You’re Wired” section of your YouMap®. Combine these phrases to best describe yourself in one or two sentences. Be prepared to back up your statement with an example when it comes time for an interview.
Tip: The “Strengths Insight Guide” you downloaded from the Gallup website when you completed the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment is an excellent source of strengths-based language to describe you. You can combine these phrases with the outcome or result the strength produces—what an employer or client receives.
Here are some examples of “My Unique Contribution” statements:
I possess an uncommon blend of strong process and people orientation.
I enjoy solving problems and developing people toward increased performance.
When working with clients, I tailor my approach to draw out and understand each client’s unique needs. I am meticulous and tireless in bringing their vision to reality.
My unique contribution is a rare trait of being analytical and methodical with a strong social orientation. This leads to a customer-centric approach to problem solving, strategy, planning, analysis and research, while fostering an environment of service and collaboration.
I have an imaginative mind that generates novel ideas complimented by strategic practicality to identify the most viable and feasible options to solve problems or improve an outcome.
I’m an independent an
d focused goal setter who thrives in dynamic environments and seeks continuous improvement and innovation. I am adept at planning and designing solutions.
Even if some of these unique contribution statements sound like you, do not copy and paste them into your YouMap®. Go through the exercise of jotting down key words and phrases from your profile to come up with a statement that strongly reflects you.
Once your profile is complete you can bring it with you to a job interview or share it with clients. I’ll go into detail how to use your document during an interview in the “Show the World!” section.
If completing your YouMap® proves tricky or difficult, skip ahead to the section “Case Study: Antonette, The Pharma Sales Rep” immediately following the YouMap® template on the next page. I’ll walk through a case study of an actual client and break down each step of the discovery process using my client’s information. With her permission, I share insights about her results in each step to bring additional clarity to the process.
If you’ve completed your YouMap®, I recommend taking one additional step before we move to the next section of the book.
On your YouMap®, highlight your “deal makers” and “deal breakers” in each of the four pillars of career satisfaction that we’ve explored. Deal makers are the strengths, skills, values, and aspects of your career interests that you must have in your next role.
Deal breakers are the things you must avoid when considering a career move. Most often your deal breakers are found in your burnout skills. You simply don’t want to take a position that will require you to perform certain skills on a regular basis.
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