When you don’t know what to do, become a School Teacher
As a third year university student, there have been more and more talks around me about people’s plans after graduation. There are people who know (and have known for the longest time) what kind of career they want to pursue but there are also people who still have absolutely no clue. I happen to be in the second group. Unfortunately, with my graduation date coming in just over a year, I don’t have the luxury of “I’ll just figure it out later” anymore. So after reading about career development theories in the textbook, I decided to take a career development test to determine my RIASEC code (http://personality-testing.info/tests/RIASEC/). My result: SAC (social, artistic, conventional), with elementary school teaching as one of the recommended professions. The question is, “Does this code accurately predict the best working environment for me?”
The test required me to rate 48 tasks on a 5 point Likert scale based on how much I would enjoy performing each one. My first concern comes with my unfamiliarity and inexperience with many tasks that were presented on the test (ie. Designing artwork for magazines). Sure I could have inferred based on other similar tasks (ie. Painting a picture or drawing in a sketchbook). However, despite both tasks being of an artistic nature, they still vary in many aspects. One of my extremely artistic friends started doing graphic design and he absolutely hated it. He wasn’t comfortable using the different design software and he felt that there wasn’t as much freedom to express his own ideas through graphic design as he did in his paintings. So as much as we can try to predict what we’ll enjoy doing, we won’t actually know whether or not we enjoy it until we actually TRY IT.
For the tasks that I’ve experienced, how can I accurately gage if I enjoyed them or not? As people, we naturally have a tendency to enjoy the things we’re good at. And unfortunately, we might not be very good at certain things we really want to do. There are a couple of tasks on the list that I’ve tried and performed relatively well. This might give me the feeling of enjoyableness when I think about it now but it’s unlikely to keep me motivated for years and years if I choose to pursue a career involving that task. I’ve heard countless stories of people quitting a job that they’re very good at because at the end of the day, it simply wasn’t their passion.
Finally if I look at my test scores, I see that I scored very closely on 5 out of the 6 categories. If I had written “Enjoy” instead of “Slightly Enjoy” for one of the tasks, I might very well have ended up with a different RIASEC code. This shows to some extent, that the discriminant validity for each RIASEC code and the overall test-retest reliability probably isn’t very high. Do I think this test gave me an accurate idea of the best working environment for me? Not really. In fact, I might be better off keeping an open mind to explore my future. Life is full of opportunities and you never know WHEN, WHERE and HOW you’ll stumble upon your deepest passion.
