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Your result
The career you have had The career you would prefer
The parts of your career you were sure about are the hardest to change. Where you weren't sure, look at the types that differ from yours on just that letter. Each one is a career very much like yours, different in one way, and could be a path worth exploring.
You were sure about every part of your career, so no type one letter away is an easy step from the career you have.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Varied instead of Focused The Octopus moves between very different roles. Your roles so far have been fairly similar, but that can change: a role that asks for different know-how would be a start.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Pollinator moves across very different environments. Your career so far has been somewhat rooted, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. You could look for a new sector, a different culture or another country, for instance.
Similar roles, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Shepherd gets competent at many things instead of expert at one. You mostly keep going towards expert. Letting one area rest at competent, and spending that time on something new, is another way to go.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Diver gives one commitment its full attention at a time. You mostly hold several commitments at once. Putting everything into one for a while might be worth trying.
Very different roles, similar environments, towards mastery in at least one, several at once.
Varied instead of Focused The Octopus moves between very different roles. Your roles so far have been fairly similar, but that can change: a role that asks for different know-how would be a start.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Widespread instead of Rooted The Pollinator moves across very different environments. Your career so far has been somewhat rooted, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. You could look for a new sector, a different culture or another country, for instance.
Similar roles, similar environments, competent, several at once.
Competence instead of Mastery The Shepherd gets competent at many things instead of expert at one. You mostly keep going towards expert. Letting one area rest at competent, and spending that time on something new, is another way to go.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Serial instead of Parallel The Diver gives one commitment its full attention at a time. You mostly hold several commitments at once. Putting everything into one for a while might be worth trying.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Banyan's moves mostly start from their own search. Most of your moves came to you through offers. Going out and finding the next one yourself could take your career somewhere new.
Similar roles, similar environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Banyan's moves mostly come from offers and assignments. Most of your moves started from your own search, but saying yes to an offer you didn't go looking for can open doors too.
Your result:
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Your type in full: The Banyan
One of the Specialists, the family of careers that do one kind of work in similar environments
One kind of work, in one world, held as several posts at once, with a drive for mastery. (FRMP)
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In everyday English, a banyan is a fig tree of India. A banyan sends roots down from its branches, and where those roots reach the soil they thicken into new trunks, so one tree becomes a grove without moving. Every new trunk draws water from the soil for the same tree and carries the same tree’s leaves. A Banyan career grows the same way, with one deep craft held in several posts at once, all standing in the same world, and every post feeding the one craft.
Coming soon
The BanyanThe scan shows the career you've had. The trait test, which I'm building now, shows which of the sixteen types fits who you are, and how far your career is from that type.
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Our signup is not answering just now. This opens the newsletter's own signup page, with your address filled in.
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A Banyan (FRMP) practises one craft in several posts at once, all in one world, and keeps lifting the standard of that craft whether or not any post asks for a higher standard.
A Banyan’s world, their work environment, stays the same, with the same standards in every post. Every job or seat a Banyan holds counts as a post, paid or unpaid, and the craft behind the posts can be medicine, law or engineering as well as woodwork or pastry. Over the years the set of posts changes. A Banyan adds a post, hands a second post to a successor or moves to a senior grade in a third post.
An architect runs her own practice in one city, teaches the course that prepares the city’s young architects for their professional exam and sits on the panel that reviews the city’s largest building plans. Practice, course and panel are paid from three different purses, yet all three are architecture, and all three are about the buildings of one city.
For a Banyan, holding several posts is part of how the craft gets better, because each post brings problems the other posts do not meet. For the architect, the review panel shows what the city’s other firms get wrong, the practice keeps the architect’s judgement on the panel tied to real buildings, and the course passes both lessons on to the city’s next architects. However, the push for mastery runs in every post at once, so the hours for any one post are fewer than that post could use.
A Focused career stays with one kind of work, such as nursing, carpentry or tax law. The know-how carries over from one role to the next, so each new role builds on the last.
At the other end, a Varied career takes on kinds of work that have little in common.
A Rooted career stays in one recognisable world, such as one sector, one profession or one city's cultural life. The people, the rules and the habits of that world stay familiar from role to role.
At the other end, a Widespread career moves between very different worlds.
A Mastery career keeps pushing past good enough, in at least one area and often in several, whether or not anyone asks for it.
At the other end, a Competence career gets good enough and spends its energy elsewhere.
A Parallel career holds several commitments at once, such as a job, a practice and a seat on a board. Each keeps running while the others do.
At the other end, a Serial career holds one commitment at a time.
The first two letters of a code shape a working life more than the other two. How varied the roles are and how different their environments decide what a career is like from one year to the next, so the sixteen career types are grouped by those two letters into four families.
The method behind the types. Every career type here comes from one typology, built on five aspects of a career, each running between two ends. A type is the end a career sits nearest on each.
One kind of work, in similar environments
Very different work, in similar environments
One kind of work, across very different environments
Very different work, across very different environments
Several commitments at once, with a push for mastery
A firefighter leads a shift crew at one of the city’s fire stations, teaches the course on breathing apparatus at the service’s training centre and is on call for the service’s rope rescue team. A way of lowering an injured person down a narrow stairwell, which the firefighter worked out with the rope team, is now part of the training every new recruit receives at the centre.
A pastry chef owns a small pastry shop, is the pastry adviser to one of the city’s hotels and teaches the evening pastry course at the city’s catering college. The shop is where the pastry chef tests a recipe, the hotel’s breakfast table is where the most demanding guests taste the result, and the course makes the pastry chef explain every step. A croissant recipe the pastry chef reworked for the students now sells out at the shop by mid-morning every day.
A botanist is curator of the garden’s orchid collection, head of the garden’s laboratory for growing plants from tissue and the garden’s member on the national panel that lists threatened plants. When the panel heard that an orchid long thought lost in the wild had been found again on one hillside, the laboratory already held the orchid’s tissue in culture, and within three years the garden’s glasshouses had raised young plants to strengthen the few survivors on that hillside.
Every career type suits some people more than others, and part of the reason lies in their traits. The test measures the traits behind each letter of the code, and these four draw people to a Banyan career.
They are less inclined to explore the unknown when it feels risky.
They seldom go looking for contacts outside their usual circle, and networking events are not for them.
They would rather tackle a hard problem than an easy one.
They are comfortable when an interruption breaks their flow of work.
Every Banyan career sits somewhere between Self-Led and Guided, depending on where its roles came from. Most careers hold some of each, and the variant follows the moves that shaped the career most. Self-Led or Guided
FRMPO, O for owned
Every post a Self-Led Banyan holds began with the Banyan’s own step, a workshop opened, an application to teach a course, a candidacy for a professional panel or a society founded. The Banyan chooses every post, so the set of posts follows the parts of the craft the Banyan most wants to work on, and each new post can be picked for what the other posts cannot teach.
A Self-Led Banyan also has to win or build every post. No institution hands a Self-Led Banyan the next post, and a post the Banyan starts takes months of setting up before the post brings any work in the craft itself. Starting one new post at a time, and only once the posts already held need little day-to-day attention, keeps the setting up from taking the hours the craft needs.
Takahiro Yoshino, a Self-Led BanyanTakahiro Yoshino learned woodworking at a training school and as a helper to two makers. In his late twenties Yoshino set up a studio of his own, and two years later moved the studio to Lake Kawaguchiko, near Mount Fuji. There Yoshino builds chairs fitted to each customer’s body, using about three hundred hand-made woodworking planes. Around the studio Yoshino has since founded a woodworking school, a society for the wood culture of Mount Fuji and a chair laboratory holding about two hundred and fifty chairs. A Self-Led Banyan (FRMP-O).
FRMPG, G for guided
A Guided Banyan is invited into each post. An engineering institution asks a working engineer to examine the institution’s new members, a conservatoire asks a cathedral organist to teach the organ, and a professional body asks a practising architect onto the body’s review panel. An invitation does away with the application, so a Guided Banyan spends that time on the craft instead. Each offered post also carries the institution’s name, so people who have not seen the Banyan’s work still know the Banyan is trusted.
Each invited post also comes with the institution’s purpose, so a conservatoire may want the organ taught for the exams when the organist would rather teach the repertoire, and the push for mastery has to fit inside the institution’s brief. A Guided Banyan can agree, before saying yes, which existing duty the new post replaces.
Barbara Schock-Werner, a Guided BanyanBarbara Schock-Werner trained as a draughtswoman, with placements in carpentry and masonry, before studying architecture in Stuttgart, and wrote her doctorate in art history on Strasbourg Cathedral. The cathedral chapter, the clergy who govern Cologne Cathedral, chose Schock-Werner as the cathedral’s master builder, the first woman in the post. For thirteen years Schock-Werner ran the cathedral’s workshops, with about sixty people, and saw Gerhard Richter’s window installed. Alongside the cathedral Schock-Werner chaired the European association of cathedral master builders. A Guided Banyan (FRMP-G).
Souha Kanj qualified as a doctor in Beirut and trained in infectious diseases at Duke University, where Kanj set up a service for infections in transplant patients. Kanj then joined the American University of Beirut Medical Center, and four years later became head of the centre’s division of infectious diseases. Beside running the division, Kanj chaired Lebanon’s first modern infection control programme and co-chaired the hospital’s programme for the careful use of antibiotics. The International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy elected Kanj its president. A Guided Banyan (FRMP-G).
Johann Vexo trained as an organist at the conservatoires of Strasbourg and Paris. At twenty-five Vexo won the competition for organist of the choir organ at Notre-Dame de Paris, the smaller organ that accompanies the services, a post Vexo held for fifteen years. Vexo is also principal organist of the great organ of Nancy Cathedral, so for years Vexo played in both cathedrals, and Vexo teaches organ at the Strasbourg conservatoire as well. Vexo gives recitals from Russia to New Zealand. A Guided Banyan (FRMP-G).
Giuliano Merlini built his first instrument at sixteen, self-taught, then studied violin making in Parma and worked for two years in a Florence workshop. At about thirty Merlini opened his own workshop at Bagno a Ripoli, near Florence, to build and restore string instruments, bowed and plucked, and became a restorer for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Tuscan regional orchestra. Nineteen years later Merlini added a school to the workshop, and the region of Tuscany recognised the school as a workshop school for instrument making. A Self-Led Banyan (FRMP-O).
Rumiko Takahashi took a course at Kazuo Koike’s manga school while at university and drew her own dōjinshi, small self-published comics. The magazine Weekly Shōnen Sunday then began serialising Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura, and two years later Big Comic Spirits added her Maison Ikkoku, so for seven years Takahashi drew two series at once. Takahashi later drew Mermaid Saga beside Ranma ½, and the Angoulême comics festival gave Takahashi its Grand Prix. A Self-Led Banyan (FRMP-O).
Takahiro Yoshino learned woodworking at a training school and as a helper to two makers. In his late twenties Yoshino set up a studio of his own, and two years later moved the studio to Lake Kawaguchiko, near Mount Fuji. There Yoshino builds chairs fitted to each customer’s body, using about three hundred hand-made woodworking planes. Around the studio Yoshino has since founded a woodworking school, a society for the wood culture of Mount Fuji and a chair laboratory holding about two hundred and fifty chairs. A Self-Led Banyan (FRMP-O).
Barbara Schock-Werner trained as a draughtswoman, with placements in carpentry and masonry, before studying architecture in Stuttgart, and wrote her doctorate in art history on Strasbourg Cathedral. The cathedral chapter, the clergy who govern Cologne Cathedral, chose Schock-Werner as the cathedral’s master builder, the first woman in the post. For thirteen years Schock-Werner ran the cathedral’s workshops, with about sixty people, and saw Gerhard Richter’s window installed. Alongside the cathedral Schock-Werner chaired the European association of cathedral master builders. A Guided Banyan (FRMP-G).
At work, a Banyan (FRMP) is the colleague whom people in the same line of work also meet elsewhere, teaching, judging or practising the same craft.
Banyans can tell a colleague in their line of work what each next step asks and how it is usually reached.
They can show the people they train what only long practice teaches.
Something that works in one of their roles can be tried in another while they still hold both.
They grow the place’s own ways further, rather than importing someone else’s.
Every post a Banyan holds is the same craft, so when the craft has less work, a Banyan has no second kind of work to move into. A manager looking for someone to cover a different kind of work passes over the Banyan, however senior the Banyan is in the craft. The gap appears when the craft’s work shrinks in several posts at once, or when a team short of people asks who could take on work outside the craft.
Banyan careers grow in worlds that need one craft in several forms at once, in the practice, in the teaching and in the judging, and where the same people meet in all three forms. In a ballet company or a geological survey the extra posts are usually offered, while a mason in a region’s stone trade usually has to start each extra post.
Principal dancer, teacher of the company class, coach at the company’s school
Field geologist, keeper of the survey’s collection of drilled rock samples, expert witness at public planning hearings
Mason with a yard of their own, restorer for the heritage body, instructor at the trade school
Watchmaker with a workshop of their own, restorer for the national museum’s clocks, examiner for the horological institute
Binder with a bindery of their own, conservator of the national library’s bindings, teacher at the craft school
Surveyor with a practice of their own, examiner for the surveyors’ institution, expert on boundary disputes for the courts
Player on a club’s first team, coach of the junior squad, referee at tournaments
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits a Banyan.
On this site the word names the four types of the family that stays with one kind of work in one world, the Banyan among them. In ordinary speech a specialist is someone who has gone deep in one field, which is where the Banyan and the Diver (FRMS) stand out among the four. FRThe Specialists
A set of jobs and seats held in the same years. The site’s portfolio type is the Keystone (VRCP), who mixes very different kinds of work, but the everyday phrase needs no mix, and a Banyan’s posts in one craft make a portfolio too. VRCPThe Keystone
In a Banyan (FRMP) career a new post, a post given up or a post exchanged for a more senior one shifts hours and lessons between all the other posts. Every one of those shifts decides which parts of the craft get the Banyan’s best hours for the next few years.
A study visit, an exchange or a joint project with practitioners of the same craft in another country or sector shows a Banyan other ways of doing the work. When the Banyan’s own world is reorganised, the people choosing who leads the change often look for experience from outside that world.
When a new post is offered or an old post comes up for renewal, a Banyan can choose the post in a growing part of the craft, such as a new technique or a new kind of client. If the older part of the craft shrinks, one post already stands on growing ground.
Of the several posts a Banyan holds, one can be chosen for how far the post’s record travels, such as a recognised qualification, a published method or a course that students from other cities take. The record of that post is the part of a Banyan’s work that strangers in other worlds can check.
Agreeing with the client, the editor or the colleague, before a piece of work starts, what the finished piece has to achieve gives each post a point where the Banyan can stop. The push for mastery then goes to the pieces of work that gain most from the push.
Keeping the mornings, or the quietest days, for the post where the craft is pushed hardest stops the other posts’ meetings from filling those hours. The posts with fixed meetings then take the remaining days.
| The skill |  Focused |  Rooted |  Mastery |  Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliberate practice Working on one fault of the craft in every post at once, until the fault is gone from all of the posts. M | Serves Mastery | |||
| Cognitive load management Holding every post's calendar in view, so a busy month in one post is planned for in the other posts. P | Serves Parallel | |||
| Analogical reasoning Seeing that a solution from the teaching post fits a problem in the practice, and changing the solution until the solution fits. FP | Serves Focused | Serves Parallel | ||
| Seeing change coming Catching early that the craft is losing work, or that the craft's world is about to be reorganised, while there is time to prepare. FR | Serves Focused | Serves Rooted | ||
| Making work visible Putting the craft on record, in writing, in teaching or in a body of work, so that people outside the one world can judge the craft. R | Serves Rooted | |||
| Knowing when to quit Giving up a post that has nothing new to teach the Banyan, even while the post still brings standing or pay. MP | Serves Mastery | Serves Parallel |
A Banyan (FRMP) career is usually reached from the Shepherd (FRCP) or the Diver (FRMS), and two more careers lie beyond the Banyan.
The same craft and world, held as several posts, each post done well. A Shepherd career becomes a Banyan career once the push for mastery starts.
The same craft and world, held one post at a time. A Diver career becomes a Banyan career once a second commitment is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
FRMPA Banyan knows one craft from the angle of every post held, the maker’s, the teacher’s and the judge’s, and that knowledge goes into whatever post comes next.
Both at once, very different work in very different worlds, leads toward the PolymathVWMP
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Coming soon
The BanyanThe scan shows the career you've had. The trait test, which I'm building now, shows which of the sixteen types fits who you are, and how far your career is from that type.
You are on the list as . Look in your inbox for the first email.
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