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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, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Varied instead of Focused The Reinventor 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, similar environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Diver stays in similar environments, where the people and the rules are familiar. Your environments so far have varied somewhat. Choosing one world and putting down roots there could suit you as well.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Competence instead of Mastery The Nomad 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, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Pollinator holds several commitments at once. You mostly hold commitments one at a time, but maybe a part-time role or a side project next to your main work would suit you.
Very different roles, very different environments, towards mastery in at least one, one at a time.
Varied instead of Focused The Reinventor 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, similar environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Rooted instead of Widespread The Diver stays in similar environments, where the people and the rules are familiar. Your environments so far have varied somewhat. Choosing one world and putting down roots there could suit you as well.
Similar roles, very different environments, competent, one at a time.
Competence instead of Mastery The Nomad 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, very different environments, towards mastery, several at once.
Parallel instead of Serial The Pollinator holds several commitments at once. You mostly hold commitments one at a time, but maybe a part-time role or a side project next to your main work would suit you.
Similar roles, very different environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Self-Led instead of Guided A Self-Led Pilgrim'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, very different environments, towards mastery, one at a time.
Guided instead of Self-Led A Guided Pilgrim'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 Pilgrim
One of the Voyagers, the family of careers that do one kind of work across very different environments
One kind of work, across very different worlds, taken one at a time, with a drive for mastery. (FWMS)
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In everyday English, a pilgrim is someone who travels a long way, through many different places, for one purpose. A Pilgrim career keeps one purpose too, a single kind of work, and carries that work into very different worlds, one after another. In each world a Pilgrim takes the work further than the world asked, and so reaches the next world with more to offer.
Coming soon
The PilgrimThe 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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A Pilgrim (FWMS) carries one kind of work, taken further than anyone asks, into very different worlds, and the work gives the Pilgrim a place in worlds closed to most people.
The craft, meaning the skilled work itself, stays the same from move to move. The lists below call the craft a trade, and on this page a trade covers a surgeon’s or an engineer’s work as much as a cook’s. A Pilgrim’s world, their work environment, differs from one move to the next. The colleagues, the customs, the speed of decisions and often the language and the country are new, so each new world is learned from the start while the craft is already at work.
A structural engineer who designs bridges for a national roads agency, then towers for a contractor in Singapore, then houses built to survive earthquakes for a government housing programme in Nepal has done one kind of work in three worlds that share little beyond the physics. A single employer may contain very different worlds, as a mining group does with its head office in a capital and its mines in a desert. Several employers can also share one world, such as the shipping lines of a single port.
Pilgrims also push for mastery. A Pilgrim treats the unfamiliar problems of each new world as practice, and holds the work to a standard that keeps rising whatever the local habit.
Depth in one craft, taken into very different worlds, lets a Pilgrim see what one world can learn from another, and every world the Pilgrim enters gets a colleague who brings the best the craft can do.
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 Widespread career moves between very different worlds, such as a ministry, a startup and a charity, or one country's working life and another's. Each new world brings its own people, rules and habits, learned afresh at every move.
At the other end, a Rooted career stays in one recognisable world.
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.
At the other end, a Parallel career holds several commitments at once.
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
One commitment at a time, with a push for mastery
A data scientist forecasts demand for a supermarket chain, moves to an electricity grid operator to predict how much power homes use on winter evenings, then joins an aid agency to forecast failed harvests from rainfall and market prices. Each move brings new colleagues, new rules about data and a new idea of what a wrong forecast costs. The data scientist rebuilt the aid agency’s harvest model three times to catch failures the first versions missed, and the model now gives district officials two months’ warning of a poor harvest.
A paintings conservator trains in a national gallery’s studio and then works for herself, first for dealers and auction houses, then for owners of historic country houses, then for a museum in Accra restoring its modern Ghanaian paintings. Each kind of client sets its own rules on what may be touched. Auction houses in three countries now send the conservator paintings with flaking paint, and the conservator’s method for fixing such paint in place is taught in the studio where the conservator trained.
A cook trains in a restaurant with three Michelin stars in France, then cooks for a motor racing team, feeding drivers and mechanics at a different circuit every fortnight, then cooks for the crew of a research station on Svalbard, in the Arctic, where a season’s food arrives on one ship. The recipes the cook wrote on Svalbard for cooking well from stored food are now used in the kitchens of four other polar stations.
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 Pilgrim career.
They are less inclined to explore the unknown when it feels risky.
They like being known for connections across many different backgrounds.
They enjoy tasks that push their abilities to a higher level.
Doing one thing for a long time seldom bores them.
Every Pilgrim 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
FWMSO, O for owned
A Self-Led Pilgrim sends the craft where the Pilgrim wants it tested. The target may be the world with the hardest problems in the work, the best people to learn from or a kind of client new to the Pilgrim. A Self-Led Pilgrim applies for a post abroad, moves from a company to a charity or goes freelance, and so builds a sequence of worlds that no employer would have planned.
The people hiring in a new world have not seen the Pilgrim’s work, so the craft has to prove itself again, and the costs of the move, from a work permit to a language course, fall on the Pilgrim. Hard problems promised at an interview are sometimes rarer in the daily work. Before accepting a post, a Self-Led Pilgrim can ask to see the hardest piece of work the new world has in hand, since that piece of work shows how far the new world will stretch the craft.
Maria Sibylla Merian, a Self-Led PilgrimMaria Sibylla Merian published her first book of caterpillars with fifty plates she engraved herself. Merian later spent six years studying insects in a religious community in Friesland before moving to Amsterdam. At fifty-two Merian sailed to Suriname with her younger daughter to study its insects and plants. Merian’s book of sixty engraved plates, each showing an insect on the plant it fed on, made her famous among natural scientists and art historians. A Self-Led Pilgrim (FWMS-O).
FWMSG, G for guided
An institution decides where a Guided Pilgrim’s craft goes next. A medical charity, an engineering consultancy or a mining group sends the Pilgrim through very different worlds, often to where the craft is most needed, and the Pilgrim takes the craft deeper in every world. The institution pays for each move and for the training, and introduces the Pilgrim to each new world, so a Guided Pilgrim arrives with a post, a team and the institution’s name behind the work.
The institution also keeps the order of the worlds. A posting can end just as a world starts to reward the depth the Pilgrim has built in that world, and the next posting follows the institution’s plans, which may pull the craft away from the problems the Pilgrim would pick. An institution that paid for the Pilgrim’s training can also ask for years of service in return. A Guided Pilgrim can leave each posting with one piece of the craft that carries on in that world, such as a method written down or a colleague trained in it, so the depth built in one posting stays in use after the next posting begins.
Pia Sundhage, a Guided PilgrimIn the United States, Pia Sundhage was assistant coach at the Philadelphia Charge and then head coach of the Boston Breakers, who won the American women’s league. The United States then hired Sundhage to coach its national team, which won Olympic gold twice under her. Sundhage went on to coach Sweden and then Brazil, where she was the first coach from outside the country and won the South American championship. Sundhage has since coached Switzerland. A Guided Pilgrim (FWMS-G).
Paolo Serra trained at Italy’s military academy and became an officer of the Alpini, Italy’s mountain troops. Among Serra’s postings were command of an Alpine regiment in Kosovo under NATO, the Julia Alpine Brigade, NATO’s regional command in western Afghanistan and army attaché in Washington. Serra also took a master’s degree in strategic studies at the United States Army War College. The UN Secretary-General then appointed Serra head of the UN force in Lebanon. A Guided Pilgrim (FWMS-G).
Xuanzang entered a Buddhist monastery in China at thirteen. Troubled by contradictions between the Chinese schools of Buddhism, Xuanzang set out for India to find the original texts, though the emperor had refused him a travel permit. Xuanzang crossed the Silk Road and the Hindu Kush and studied at the Nalanda monastery under the master Śīlabhadra. Back in Chang’an about sixteen years after leaving, Xuanzang brought home hundreds of Buddhist texts from India. A Self-Led Pilgrim (FWMS-O).
Zdeněk Ježek was an epidemiologist in Prague when the World Health Organization chose Ježek for a project in Mongolia, where Ježek organised the country’s first nationwide polio vaccination of children. The WHO then sent Ježek to fight smallpox in South Asia and in Somalia, as lead epidemiologist of the Horn of Africa’s programme. Ježek co-wrote the WHO’s book on smallpox eradication, and later led the WHO’s international team against Ebola in Kikwit, Zaire. A Guided Pilgrim (FWMS-G).
Maria Sibylla Merian published her first book of caterpillars with fifty plates she engraved herself. Merian later spent six years studying insects in a religious community in Friesland before moving to Amsterdam. At fifty-two Merian sailed to Suriname with her younger daughter to study its insects and plants. Merian’s book of sixty engraved plates, each showing an insect on the plant it fed on, made her famous among natural scientists and art historians. A Self-Led Pilgrim (FWMS-O).
In the United States, Pia Sundhage was assistant coach at the Philadelphia Charge and then head coach of the Boston Breakers, who won the American women’s league. The United States then hired Sundhage to coach its national team, which won Olympic gold twice under her. Sundhage went on to coach Sweden and then Brazil, where she was the first coach from outside the country and won the South American championship. Sundhage has since coached Switzerland. A Guided Pilgrim (FWMS-G).
At work, a Pilgrim (FWMS) joins a team with a craft held above the standard the job asks, and with a habit of asking how other worlds do the same work.
They can tell a colleague in their line of work what each next step asks and how it is usually reached.
They see what people who have been there for years no longer notice.
They hold their best work to a standard above what the job requires, and keep raising it.
One commitment means nobody wonders whose side they are on.
A Pilgrim’s extra effort goes into the craft itself, so the work around the craft, such as the reports, the budgets and the handover notes, can stay merely sound. In a new world, colleagues judge a newcomer partly by that surrounding work, and can form a view of a Pilgrim’s paperwork before they have seen the Pilgrim’s best work. The blind spot shows at a first appraisal in a new world, and wherever the craft’s results reach people only through a written report.
Pilgrim careers form where one craft keeps meeting problems hard enough to stretch it, in places as far apart as a surgical ship and a recording studio. Each line below names a kind of work and a typical sequence of very different worlds for it.
An army’s field surgical team, a medical charity’s surgical ship, a private clinic for heart surgery
A national public health institute, a field team tracing an outbreak, a city’s pandemic planning office
A life insurer, a pensions regulator, a reinsurer that covers natural disasters
A watch house’s workshop in the Swiss Jura, a jeweller’s repair bench in Hong Kong, a satellite maker’s timing laboratory
A national airline, an air ambulance service, a firm that sprays crops from the air
A recording studio, a touring festival stage, a parliament’s broadcast room
Clients on the classic routes of the Alps, an expedition company’s Himalayan season, a glaciology team’s field season
Other words people use for this pattern, and how each fits a Pilgrim.
The everyday words for a career that crosses borders, and they fit every type whose code carries a W, the Pilgrim among them. On this site a new country makes a new world only if the people, rules and habits of the work change with the country, so a Pilgrim’s very different worlds can lie in one country or in several.
With one craft taken deep, a Pilgrim is what many people mean by a specialist. The site keeps the name Specialists for the family that does one kind of work in similar environments, and the Pilgrim, who takes the craft through very different worlds, belongs with the Voyagers. FRThe Specialists
A Pilgrim’s move into a new world runs in stages, from the terms agreed before arriving to the choice of the world after that, and each habit below belongs to one stage.
Before starting, a Pilgrim can ask the new employer or client how the last person in the post was judged in the first months, and what that person got wrong, so the Pilgrim knows which of the new world’s unwritten rules count first.
In the first months, a Pilgrim can ask to share one piece of work with a colleague who has spent a long time in the new world. The colleague brings the world’s history and its unwritten rules, the Pilgrim brings the craft, and the new world sees both at work together.
A regular talk with a teacher from training or a former colleague gives a Pilgrim an outside view of a difficult period, so one hard post does not decide how the Pilgrim judges the whole career.
An evening class in something new to the Pilgrim, such as a sport, drawing or a musical instrument, gives practice at starting from nothing at a time when no job depends on the result. A forced change of work then finds the Pilgrim with a recent beginning to draw on.
Some worlds pay well for depth, and some offer more to learn than to earn. A Pilgrim can alternate between the two, or, if Guided, ask for a well-paid posting after a demanding one, so the extra effort earns a return during the career and not only late in it.
| The skill |  Focused |  Widespread |  Mastery |  Serial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliberate practice Setting the standard a little above what the world asks, and working at the gap on purpose. M | Serves Mastery | |||
| Cultural intelligence Changing how the work is explained, negotiated and delivered for people whose habits and language differ, while the standard of the work stays the Pilgrim's own. W | Serves Widespread | |||
| Learning the unwritten rules Reading, within weeks of arriving, what counts as good work in a new world, what its jokes and silences mean and what gets a newcomer left out. W | Serves Widespread | |||
| Translating between worlds Carrying a method that worked in one world into another, explained in terms the new world understands. WF | Serves Focused | Serves Widespread | ||
| Making the work visible Leaving a record of the work, such as a paper, a portfolio or a recorded talk, that people in a world the Pilgrim has not yet entered can see and trust. WM | Serves Widespread | Serves Mastery | ||
| Knowing when to quit Telling when a world has stopped stretching the craft, and leaving at a moment the Pilgrim picked. MS | Serves Mastery | Serves Serial |
Two career types often lead into a Pilgrim career, and two others follow from it, each one aspect away.
The same work, taken deeper in a single world. A Diver career becomes a Pilgrim career when the work moves into a very different world.
The same work across very different worlds, each role done well. A Nomad career becomes a Pilgrim career once the push for mastery starts.
FWMSA Pilgrim career builds one craft, stretched further by each very different world it passes through, and the whole of that craft goes into the next world.
Very different roles added, with the push for mastery and the very different worlds kept.
The craft and the very different worlds stay, once a second commitment is taken on beside the first, and both are kept.
Both at once, very different roles and several commitments held together, lead toward the PolymathVWMP
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Coming soon
The PilgrimThe 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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