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What Color Is Your Parachute?

As each stove came down the ever-moving assembly line, I plugged a two-pronged electric heating coil into a two-hole socket and secured it with two screws: bzzt bzzt with an airgun, like a Nascar tire changer but slower. Four calrods*, eight screws: bzzt bzzt…bzzt bzzt…bzzt bzzt…bzzt bzzt. And then another Hotpoint crawled through my 4 foot wide universe, an endless moving wall of blindingly white enamel and chrome for eight soul- and mind- crushing hours.

The factory was no more the place for the likes of me than the military had been

Off to school I went, an academic career sounding majestic to a 23-year-old former aircraft mechanic who’s punching a time clock on the night shift. As it turned out, academia wasn’t the place for me, either, so I grabbed an advanced degree and hot-footed my way out of there, ever-thankful to Indiana University’s Department of Sociology for having taught me many hard lessons about objectivity, rigor, and discipline, none more so than when a professor wrote at the top of my very first paper, “It is of no interest to me what you think.” As a Jamaican friend liked to remind me, “No, mon, you didn’t graduate no Summa Cum Laude or Magna Cum Laude – you graduated Thank You, Lawdy.”

The economy was bad and I needed a job

I signed on as a social worker, first with the confused and infirm, then with Indochinese war refugees, and finally with felons, a job that came with the occasional middle-of-the-night telephone death threat. A friend gave me a book called What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers, and I changed my career. 

Readers are told to imagine themselves arriving at a party

The room is six-sided and in each corner there is a group of like-minded people who share some key characteristics. When you’ve read the description of all six groups, choose the group you most want to join. Next, imagine that group leaves to go to another party across town. Which group will you join next? Okay, now imagine this second group leaves to go to that other party (no, you can’t go with them), and so on for all the groups described below.

• Good with words, the Social group likes to inform and enlighten.
• Artists like to exercise their imagination and creativity in unstructured situations.
• Investigative people like learning, observing, analyzing, evaluating, and problem-solving.
• Conventional people have clerical and/or numerical ability and like seeing to the details.
• Enterprising people like to persuade others for economic gain.
• Realistic people like working with machines, tools, and things.

The test format is ranked forced choice

Parachute’s party exercise presents us with seven choices to choose from. We are asked to rank our choices from 1 to 6. Math whizzes know that means there are 720 different sequences people can choose. Imagine what you could learn with that much information to work with.

Here are my first three forced choices, ranked

I headed straight for the investigative group. When they left to go to another party, I had to choose another group. Because I enjoy the company of imaginative and creative people, I went over and joined the Artists. When they left to go to that other party, I chose the Realists because I like fixing things and have much respect for craftsmen of all kinds.

How did you rank the six groups?

Your choices tell you things about yourself, perhaps in ways new to you.

A career change

It seems only logical that to thrive as workers we must not only be good at what we do but also love doing it. Nelson Bolles’ exercise in identifying the people we would “most enjoy being with for the longest time” measures our interests, but not our abilities, so let’s use a simple tool that sorts our abilities and interests into four broad categories. Every job you’re had or will have can be described with one of these four choices:

• I’m bad at it and I hate it.
• I’m bad at it but I love it.
• I’m good at it but I hate it.
• I’m good at it and I love it.

If you’re a visual learner, take a look at this 2×2 matrix

The ideal situation for all of us is a job where we’re good at it and take great pleasure from doing of it

Here some very important things to keep in mind as you figure out what kind of work is best for you:

• Our “good at” level must be defined by others, not just ourselves. Being good at something means being judged by experts as having above-average skills.
• Make sure you love it enough to do it all day every day. Over time, grooves turn into ruts, you know. 
• Also make sure you look into what the job really is and not just what it seems to be. When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine any job more thrilling than driving cars. It never occurred to my teenage mind that the chauffeur’s job I had been hired for was very little driving and a whole lot of waiting around. For every hour driving, I spent three or four hours killing time, bored to tears, constantly checking the time, wishing I was busy.
• Stay open to evolutionary change. After decades of watching my objective, rigorous, and disciplined research reports get mutilated by gatekeepers high and low, I gave up doing research and started writing about it, which led to my discovering I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching people what I’ve learned about how to plan research, which is one of the other things I do now.

If you’re at a professional crossroads, try What Color Is Your Parachute?

All you have to do is be honest with yourself. Bzzt bzzt.

*The physical structure of the calrods (CALorie ROD) consists of tubular elements that operate near red-heat temperatures, meaning that the elements can glow red when operated in certain conditions. It is the same technology that is used on electric ranges.