The Working Life: Finding the Work You Love

In this blog entry, I'll continue the focus on employment, giving you Internet links to career search resources. Two days ago, I read that up to 50 percent of people are unhappy with their jobs. To spare you that fate, and to increase the odds of your recovery, I'll give ideas on how to find the work you love.

Twenty years ago when I lived in the halfway house, one of the counselors led an afternoon goals group and at one session, he gave us the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a shorthand substitute for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Both tests determine your personality type. I learned, early in life then, that I'm an INTJ: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. INTJs comprise only about one percent of the population. Taking the MBTI-which can only be administered by a licensed professional-in 1996 confirmed this is me, there's no way around it, my personality type is accurate.

The best thing about knowing your personality type is that you'll understand what makes you tick. Certain personalities are better suited to some careers than others. Also, in terms of relationships and your orientation to life, reading about your type could help you develop strategies for living well in recovery. Luckily, you don't have to pay for the MBTI-at least three web sites offer personality type tests for free. Any of these will do, though I prefer the Temperament Sorter: http://www.advisorteam.org/instruments/KTS-II_original.html. Its counterpart is the www.keirsey.com site. You can take similar tests at: http://www.personalitytype.com/quiz.asp and http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp.

To find a short list of possible careers matched to your type, log on to http://www.bsu.edu/students/careers/questassets/type/. Or search, for example as I did, in Google, "INTJ careers" using your own type instead of INTJ.

Alternately, log on to http://www.bls.gov/OCO/, where the current version of the Occupational Outlook Handbook resides. Click on the letter corresponding to the job you're interested in, and you'll get tons of information. [I printed out the listing for rehabilitation counselor.] Once you've found a possible career or two [or however many], consider doing an "information interview" with a person already in the field who can help you decide if you'd like to pursue it. For a list of questions to ask this person, log on to http://www.quintcareers.com/information_interview.html. The purpose of this type of interview is to gather information, not for you to interview for a job, so the pressure is off. Take discreet notes; although it's preferable to ask if you can use a small voice recorder so you can maintain eye contact and an uninterrupted dialogue.

Once you find in the Occupational Outlook Handbook a few careers, you can use O*NET Online to further refine your search, by typing in http://online.onetcenter.org/. There, you can find occupations, do a skills search to match your skills to O*NET occupations, perform a crosswalk search, or do a "tools and technology" search. At the Outlook site, I found the SOC code for rehabilitation counselor, and then did a crosswalk search at O*NET, under the SOC, to discover more details about this type of work. The Outlook and O*NET sites give you the types of demand for various jobs, their salaries, and skills and abilities needed to perform the work.