Vive la Difference

Financial managers are indeed the bean counters, the people who keep track of where all the money is going. This is a sub-set of accountancy: in effect, doing the day by day work of tracking the money, the invoices, the income, the numbers work, which the accountants then come and check up on at the time of the annual audit. It is actually the route to power that the Great She Elephant, she who rules us all (pbuh) took to her position of supreme power in the organization. That is quite a common career progression, from financial management into general management: a modern company is best understood by the flows of money through it.

Training is almost always via a college degree. Even those who start as financial clerks will need to get a college degree if they are to progress: on the job experience is all very well but that college degree in business administration, finance or similar will be necessary. Many companies now insist upon a Master’s as well.

The job is a good illustration, in terms of our EQSQ personality tests, of the way in which the world of work has changed in recent years. 30 years ago this form of management was highly systematic: computers were large beasts that needed specialist programming, huge amounts of time would be spent in making sure that the data was correctly collated and then entered and then even more time spent trying to understand the results.

With the modern PC all of this can be done on a desktop and the most difficult part, running simulations to see “what if” is a trivial exercise on any spreadsheet package. This has meant that from being a highly male brain job it is now much more associated with those who can work in the large teams common to this sort of management: much more of a female brain type.

While there may have been this change it is still true that a strong head for numbers is required: so a balanced brain type opportunity.

Fashion designers? 17,000 jobs in the US? Really? I mean, how many people do you need to decide upon the color of a pair of jeans? and to put sparkly bits on t-shirts?

Well, that’s what the BLS tell me about the number of people who do that job so obviously there’s some people out there getting more serious about their duds than the people I see in WalMart then.

Being slightly more serious this is exactly the type of high value added job that the US should and does specialize in. Getting the clothes made can be done very cheaply in India or China but you need people on the ground, in touch with the prevailing trends, to do the actual designing. I thought it interesting that 2/3 of all of them were in either New York or California, because that’s another attribute of creative industries: clustering. The third attribute the BLS makes less of but it is common to things like journalism, TV, the movies and so on. Entry level jobs are horrendously paid, really badly. But once established, they quickly move to well above average for all jobs in the country. While it isn’t actually called an apprenticeship, it is very much like serving one.

The usual training is a college degree, either a two or four year one. That college degree is usually in fashion design itself.

As to our EQSQ personality tests this is an oddity of a job. Very strong systemizing skills are necessary as the designer needs to understand the entire manufacturing process in order to, well, design things that can be manufactured efficiently. But those systemizing traits (or male brain attributes), while necessary, are not sufficient. For to create a design that captures a mood (or the mood of the country if you prefer) it is necessary to also have very strong empathic skills. So not just a balanced brain type, but one that is both highly systemizing and empathic.

There’s an old saying that the teacher learns more than the student and while I’m just the writer here (”just”: did you hear the old joke about the actress in Hollywood so dumb that she slept with the writer in the hope of getting a part? We’re not the highest regarded occupation you know, mere inches above politicians and economists on the ladder.) I’m certainly learning a lot from being here.

The BLS tells us that there’s 205,000 fitness workers in the US. That many? I knew a few Hollywood types had personal trainers and that there was the occasional gym about the place but that many? I guess the fitness revolution passed me by in more ways than one then.

The usual training is certification in whichever specific subset of the field you want to work in. Each field has its own certification body so working out exactly which one you want can be tricky. As is common in so much of American society these days there is an increasing movement towards asking for a college degree, perhaps in exercise science or physical education. There’s something ghoulish about the fact that over and above certification and that possible college degree, you’ll also need to show your skills in CPR: a constant worry is that you might allow people to overtrain.

As to our EQSQ personality tests I think the brain type being looked for here is fairly clear: female brain type or empathic. This is, after all, a job teaching people, motivating them, so it very much calls on the people skills side of the balance sheet.

I think this little survey from the UK can be relied upon to create a suitable argument for us all to chew over. From The Register, news that women over 50 will make the best managers in the years to come. Surprisingly the reason given is not the increasing infantilization of society so that those who have successfully potty trained and raised a family will be best placed to cope with the workers of tomorrow.

Now, the survey does have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. YouGov are known for producing results which accord with the interests of those paying for the survey and in this case those people are BT: the telephone company in other words. So what they say about flexible workforces working from home (over the telephone lines perhaps?) does need to be sifted a little rather than swallowed whole.

But the reason given was that the soft management skills, of empathy, empowerment, most importantly, trust in the workers themselves, are what will equip the more mature woman (I don’t think we’re allowed to say “older” any more are we?) for those management roles.

Which brings us to our EQSQ personality tests of course. As we know, it is not the fact of being male or female that decides upon possession of these skills. It is whether, by those personality tests, one is empathic or systemizing. Certainly, sex has something to do with the liklihood, 17% of women in fact having the male brain type and 17% of men the female, but what our personality tests help to do is sort through that, identify those suitable for this sort of management more accurately. Yes, we’d expect more women to have these skills, but a good number of men as well.

Interesting, don’t you think? Management being less about the traditionally male virtues of leadership and more about the traditionally female, of empathy, nurturing the talents and trust? Those “traditional talents” being, of course, those associated with the brain type, not sex itself. My, how the world is changing.

This is an interesting little occupation: well, little might not be the word for it as there are still 1.3 million in the field (sorry).
No, I think that the interest is in the way that the job has changed so much in the past century and a bit. It really wasn’t that long ago, an eye blink even in recorded history, that just about everyone was a farmer. No choice to it, agriculture was so inefficient that it needed 80%, 90%, of the population scratching in the fileds just to feed everyone. Now it’s less than 1% of the workforce and we actually export food!

So something has definitely changed: it isn’t, any longer, something that can be picked up at Granpaw’s knee and by going and doing the chores on a farm while growing up. Even things like the 4-H aren’t enough (although they’re very useful of course). These days a college degree is required: it might be a two year one or the full four year college degree but that, plus working with an experienced farmer to begin with, seem to be the basic necessities. (That’s according to the BLS.)

Providing this sort of education is pretty much what the land grant colleges are for and every state has one. Programs in agriculture and agronomy are also run at a number of other colleges, both public and private.

So, what do we think about farmers on our EQSQ personality tests then? Empathizers or systemizers? I’m such a city boy that I’m not sure but I’ll take something of a guess here. It depends a little on which type of farming is being done: growing corn or wheat is going to need different skills in this area than herding sheep or goats will. But as I say, I’m such a city boy that I don’t know. You put the fertilizer on the goats, right, and the fodder is sprayed over the wheat fields?

We looked yesterday at engineering technicians.Today we have engineers which to many will seem like simply a step up in the same profession. This isn’t really quite true. The preparation is different for the career for sure but the actual nature of the job is also very different. As we saw, the technicians are very much hands on types, running down the problems in what has already been designed and built. Engineers themselves are rather more cerebral types.

The training is more cerebral too: a four year college degree in engineering (of one of the many types, aerospace, petroleum, etc) is the absolute minimum for an entry level job. There is one advantage to engineering for those taking a college degree though: it has perhaps the highest entry level pay after graduation of any career (as the BLS tells us).

Given the emphasis on math and science which is central to engineering itself, we might think that this is similarly an exclusively systemizing or male brain type job, as measured by our EQSQ personality tests. Well, sorta, for yes, engineers do need strong systemizing traits. However, modern day engineering is no longer the preserve of the lone genius inventing out in the garden shed or garage. It can’t be, it’s all way too complex for that now. No, these things are done in teams now, huge teams, which means that the empathic side of one’s nature needs to be developed as well.

In fact we might say that engineering is one of those disciplines which is changing its requirements, from the previous pure systemizing type, to the more balanced brain type: still capable of and happy with the science requirements but also more empathic and thus a team player.

This sounds like an entirely fabulous job for a certain kind of male brain or systemizing person. In fact, reading the BLS description of what the job entails it is almost the perfect systemizer’s job.

Think of it this way. It might be a scientist who discovers a new and exciting way to do something. It could be the marketing department who suddenly realize that what the customers really want is a machine that does this, in a just so manner. However the idea to build a machine, electronic circuit or whatever came about, engineers then need to design it. Fine you might say, what does this have to do with the technicians? Well, nothing ever works first time. It simply doesn’t, never has done and never will. What actually happens is that something is designed and then tried out and inevitably, it doesn’t work. The engineering technicians are the people who then go and work out why. This is proper hands on work, looking at how the system ought to work, why it doesn’t, then altering it to make it actually do so.

Once that has been done the process moves on to the actual manufacturing line: picking the bugs out of this is called “plucking the low hanging fruit” in a delightful little phrase.

The usual method of entry into the job is via a two year college degree in engineering technology and there are hundreds of vocational schools, community colleges and so on that offer such college degrees. This is also one of the skill sets taught in the Armed Forces and military experience of this job is highly prized in civilian industry.

To reiterate though, by the standards of our EQSQ personality tests, this is very much a male brain, systemizer’s, type job.

Ahahaha, gurgle, splurt, snort. This is wonderful, tee hee hee. I don’t think I’ve seen a better argument for men to get a few college degrees under their belt yet.
As Futurepundit reports, there’s a difference in how the desire for sex works out between men and women as a relationship matures. Researchers in Germany interviewed a number of people and came up with results which at first are not all that surprising. At the beginning of a relationship both men and women are delighted to hop into the sack with regularity. As said relationship matures, the men seem to want sex just as strongly while the desire shown by the women for regular hanky-panky drops off.

I don’t see them discussing whether the number of children around has any influence upon this so I don’t know whether they controlled for this or not. But this shouldn’t really be all that much of a surprise anyway, given the regularity that we see surveys showing that women would rather go shopping for a new pair of shoes than have sex with their husbands. Or the even more depressing recent one (in the Blame the Hormones section) showing that Scottish housewives regard conjugal duties as just that, duties, on a par with housework.

However, men have a magic get out of jail free card here. The better educated the men are then the less likely this drop off in interest is likely to be amongst the women. The argument seems to be that a well educated man is a higher class catch than one with less academic achievement, meaning that a certain amount more effort should be put into keeping one once caught.

So gentlemen, I think this might be the strongest argument possible for further education. Get that one, two or more college degrees and you’ll get more sex throughout your marriage. If that isn’t a strong enough argument to get adolescent males studying then I really can’t think of anything else that would be.