The Future

So, it turns out I am not creative. This much I had already suspected, but now it confronts me as an inescapable fact. You see, I took a test. The lovely career lady (I was assigned to a Miss Heather Tomlinson, and she really is lovely) asked me about a hundred questions to determine my 'personality characteristics', 'job and career suitability' and (I hoped) to tell me what I should do when I leave university. She concluded that:

• I am proficient 'system based' person who does well within an existing work superstructure. So basically I am good at climbing a career ladder, passing tests, learning and teaching. In a nutshell this means I am fairly boring, unlikely to rock any boats and tear away to make my millions on my own through inventing something or forming my own company; but instead I am destined to rise fairly swiftly up a corporate ladder, if money and material success is what I want.
• If I decide I don't want to sell my soul for money and power (tempting as though those outcomes may be) I could teach, promote, write or pursue further education.
• As soon as Heather mentioned writing, I started to ask my own questions. It turns out that this test has advised against any pursuit of creative expression (i.e. design, fictional writing) but at the same time recommends writing as a career choice. Baffling. To me and Heather, this implied a choice of non-fictional writing, journalism, publishing, editing or acting as a critic of some sort.

So I haven't learned much, or at least I was not really surprised by what I was told. The only thing I didn't expect was that the test seemed to think I would be bad at starting my own company, and also at writing fiction, as these are two things I have considered seriously in the past. But then again, it's only a test. A list of pre-determined questions surely don't know me as well as I know myself, and they can't really know what's best for me, can they? Maybe they can. I took the suggestions on board anyway, and have decided to pursue three of the options the 'suitability test' suggested simultaneously: I am going to continue education by doing a Masters, this time in business management in order to explore the corporate world a bit, and at the same time start to write more and hopefully get some more stuff published. A blog seems as good a place to start as any, anyway.

Chris