Career Advice from Hipster Kitty

It's all about specialization, right?

Dictator is an unstable career choice

When I do the Meyers-Briggs personality type thing, I always end up as INTJ.
In essence, driven to understand things and then put them into practice - without any outside input, thankyouverymuch. Can't stand being "managed" let alone micromanaged, and very tough on others, with my high expectations. Equally tough on myself.

The common moniker for this type is The Mastermind (no I'm not making that up).

I've been using this to try to figure out my next career move, and happened on another personality test with a different set of criteria - the "SLOAN" test (which seems fairly ridiculous), but I loved my result: I have an "egocentric" personality. It also suggested a list of possible careers, headed off by dictator, assassin, international spy, entrepreneur, and stock broker.

Unfortunately, dictator doesn't seem like a good career move right now.

The Revolution will not be televised. It will, however, be Tweeted.

I thought it would be fun to compare the two test results' career recommendations - surely, anywhere there's an overlap, I've got an affinity, right?

Aeronautical Engineer, Astronomer, Writer/Editor, Computer Programmer, Investment/Business Analyst, Judge, Management Consultant, Military Officer/Mercenary/Military Intelligence, Strategic Planner

Interestingly, I've already done 3 of these professions. Guess which ones.

Also, too bad that "assassin" wasn't on the INTJ list. I hear they make good money.

Kiddie Kristallnacht

Marjorie Ingall has a great discussion of what makes a good first-Shoah book over at Tablet.

As a mother raising a little boy whose great-grandfather hid in the real-life equivalent of the KitKat Club on Kristallnacht, and was an active member of the street kid resistance, I was fairly apalled at her description of "Benno and the Night of Broken Glass." You can be sure that our son will hear a different story, one in which people actually had and made tough choices to do the right thing.

I'd like to think my son is years away from this sort of thing, but the truth is that it's woven so intricately into my husband's family history, and he's already so well acquainted with tragedy and losing people we love, that the Shoah will no doubt come up earlier than I want. I'm glad to have such a great guide to meaningful, child-appropriate ways of discussing it.

hat-tip to Vicki Boykis for directing me to Ingalls' writing.

For good resumés, read copyblogger

Copywriting is about selling stuff, usually by creating both an image and feeling within a prospect.

Resumés are about selling yourself, in as brief a space as possible.

My new best career advice: write your resume like a copywriter. You're the product. Sell it.

(How does this apply? Look at this piece on using specifics, rather than generalizations, in your writing. Now think of it in terms of the advice to list specific achievements, rather than responsibilities, in your resumé.)

A Modest Proposal

Once again, Penelope Trunk (or rather, one of her guest bloggers) has put her finger on something I've been thinking about for a few weeks now. As a society, we have moved from a one-wage-earner-one-homemaker model to a working-parent model, but without finding a real solution to the domestic labor gap this causes.

One can hire others to do childcare, cleaning, cooking, etc., but only if you greatly reduce your standard of living in other ways - for the majority of us, this kind of help is too expensive. The most common results are either:

1. domestic labor becomes "invisible" - it is an added labor tax which women perform during their unpaid (aka "leisure") time
2. individual women limit their time in the paid workforce in order to take care of the necessary domestic chores, thus subjecting themselves to lower earning potential, and dismissal as "less-committed" workers.

The one obvious solution - men contributing more domestic labor as a tradeoff for not having to be the sole wage earner - has not generally occurred, although individual cases vary. Structurally, men today ARE doing more than their fathers or grandfathers did at home, but not enough to make up for the lack of a full-time homemaker, and not anywhere near as much as working women do in their "spare" time.

Since men are either naturally or culturally incapable of filling in this gap, I submit the following modest proposal.

To keep our economy going, we should reinstitute a draft, this time domestic instead of military, requiring anyone 18-21 to spend time working as a low-paid domestic.

Not only will they gain valuable life skills and help working families to make the most of their time and income, they will, by making domestic work a paid endeavor, contribute to our GDP and economic well-being.

See, folks? Job creation isn't that hard.