This is one of the largest occupations in the country (2.3 million people) and also the second fastest growing. There really is no problem at all in getting a job as a registered nurse, once you’ve qualified. Many places report that they simply cannot find as many as they would like.

To qualify as a registered nurse you must pass a certification exam, known as the NCLEX-RN. Before you get to that stage you must have graduated from a recognized training program. This might be to get a BSN college degree, or an Associate’s college degree in nursing (ADN) or from a Diploma program. The advantage of a BSN is that the more complex jobs and administrative ones are reserved for those who have them. The disadvantage is that it takes you longer to get. Fortunately, there are many programs that will take you if you have one of the lower qualifications and a few year’s practical experience and then help you to get that college degree.

Within nursing there are many different specialties. These can be divided by age of patient, or type of disease, or where you work and so on. For example, you can specialize in pediatric oncology, or cardiac emergency. But there’s one vital thing that you must have to be a successful nurse: even, to enjoy being one. In fact, nursing is always used as the archetype, the prime example, of a job where you really must have empathy to be able to do it. That makes placing the job using our EQSQ personality tests very simple indeed. You really do need to have a female type brain to either enjoy nursing or to do it well.

It can become quite confusing differentiating between physical, occupational and recreational therapists and recreational workers and so on. This group, the recreational therapists, are the people who use recreation (games, dance, sports, drama) as a method of helping people to recover from illness or injury, or from some chronic or even genetic conditions. For example, something we talk about a lot here, the use of role playing games to overcome some aspects of the autism spectrum would be done by recreational therapists. Similarly, while the teaching of emotional intelligence to children might be done by regular teachers, if the problems came as a result of injury or disease, it would be these therapists who ran the program.

The usual training is via a college degree in therapeutic recreation and that college degree is usually a Bachelor’s. It is possible to take an Associate’s college degree and this will qualify you for paraprofessional jobs, or even higher degrees which would be useful in senior management or research. The BLS tells us quite clearly that you will need to have reserves of empathy for this job. You’ll be working with people are ill, sometimes severely so. For example, one growing area of the work is in helping older people recover from the mishaps that accompany age, using drama to help stroke victims recover their speech, or dance for their movement.

Given that requirement for empathy I think we can see clearly where you should be in the results of our EQSQ personality tests: very much a career for those with the female brain type.

This is one of those jobs that can be anything from a part-time thing for the summer all the way through to a career as a senior manager requiring one or more college degrees. I think you know what I mean? Recreation workers include those who organise sports or activities at summer camp all the way through to the senior managers who run the parks systems for entire cities or states. So as you an imagine, educational requirements can vary from not even needing a high school degree to needing a graduate one.

However, once we take out the vacation jobs and look only at the full time ones then just about everyone will need to have a college degree, perhaps in parks and recreation or leisure studies. Having another qualification (or skill) in something like dance or certain sports is also very useful and in some cases (like a lifeguard certificate when taking people swimming) will be mandatory.

These jobs are, by their very definition, always dealing with members of the public. It’s not too much of a surprise to find that by our EQSQ personality tests that those with the female brain type, the empathisers, are best suited.

Well, most of the time that is. Certainly, to do the basic job you’ll need to like people, know how to motivate them and get on with them. But in the higher levels, the more senior positions, it is all about management and budgeting: the more systemizing skills will also be needed further up the career ladder.

Is the rather breathless news we get from Reuters. An alternative reading might be that not enough people use our EQSQ personality tests, could it not? For of course a dream job would be one where you were exercising your talents, going along with the flow of your own character and, if you were really lucky, doing what you would do even if you weren’t paid for it (well, almost).

That’s what our EQSQ personality tests are designed to help you find of course. Do you have more systemizing (or male brain) skills, in which case engineering and the sciences might be something you would enjoy? Or are you a female brain type, with the sort of empathic qualities that mean you would enjoy nursing perhaps? Take the tests to find out, why not?

One very important point came out from the survey: money isn’t everything. Certainly, we all need enough to live but those professions with the highest number saying they were in their dream job were not the most highly paid. Police officers and firefighters (35% of them said they were in their dream job), teachers (32%) and engineers (25%) are well paid, yes, but they’re not the route to untold riches and wealth. Well, except for the obvious point that so many of the people doing it find that they love doing it and thus have true riches.

When deciding upon a career or profession, or the training you’ll need, it does seem that it’s worthwhile to think about what is your dream job, then check and see if it matches up with the brain type you have with our EQSQ personality tests.

An interesting piece in an English newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, about attempts to teach pupils emotional intelligence. This mixes in with that perennial question we have about our EQSQ personality tests: should we be using them purely as a description of aptitudes or as a call to action to develop and educate ourselves?

The classes talk about emotions, teach meditation (although not the transcendental form!) and in general attempt to develop emotional literacy. While these ideas are currently being tested in a private school there is a move to make them a compulsory part of the education process for all children across the country.

In a comment that will please Millie, Frank Furedi (a famous professor in the UK) points out that teaching emotional development is all very well but it does rather depend upon how you teach it. If it is simply going to be talking about emotions then this won’t be as effective as studying the great works of art, like Shakespeare or Jane Austin. Artists both who explore the intricacies of the emotional world far better than any teenager will be able to find within themselves.

But as I say the success of such programs impacts upon how we use the results of our personality tests. If we find that we have a low EQ score, do we just say “Well, that’s the way it is”?, or do we regard it as something that can be changed, through the process of education?

My own feeling, and please do tell me if you think I’m wrong, is that it’s actually a bit of both. It doesn’t matter how much training we have, we’ll never entirely overcome the limitations of our own natures, but we can learn to mitigate the effects of the failings of them.

I found this interesting set of notes from a trainer (Christoper Flett) who helps women understand the often still very male world of business. There’s a lot of overlap between his advice and what you would get applying our EQSQ personality tests. Well, if you assumed that EQ meant women and SQ meant men, which of course is not what our personality tests actually tell us. It is, as you know, that those with the male brain do better at the systemizing, those with the female the empathic tasks. But with that proviso, that we’re talking about brain types, he about gender, there is that meeting of minds.

For example, men are goals oriented, not process: we want to do things, not worry about how. Women seek more external affirmation (highly empathic behavior, thinking not so much about the task as the reactions of others), are more selfless (ditto) and so on. All of which is rather interesting I think.

We’ve got a trainer, working purely from observational experience of the business world, who comes up with very similar answers to our own EQSQ personality tests which are based upon analysis of the actual physical structure of the brain. When you start getting similar answers from entirely different methods of calculation, you do start to think that you might be on the right track.

It seems that we’re not really supposed to discuss our EQSQ personality tests. You see, it is possible that by explaining why, given that the systemizing and empathic attributes revealed by those personality tests can help to explain why there might be a preponderance of men in a profession, (or, of course, women in another) we might be causing harm.

That’s the rather odd assertion that this post over at Overcoming Bias rejects. You see, some psychologists think there is something called the stereotype threat. If women are told (as appears to be true, on average) that women on average are worse at high level maths than men, then it is being told this truth that makes the perform worse on the tests of high level maths ability.

This to me is a quite remarkable thought: we shouldn’t tell people the truth because….well, because of anything. There’s an old line out there, along the lines (sorry) of “the universe isn’t here to confirm your prejudices”. Indeed it isn’t, the universe simply is. Vastly better to my mind to find out the truth and then propagate it. If it is true that more men than women will have those systemizing abilities required for the upper levels of math, well, fine, that’s not something to be afraid of: it’s something to be propagated, shouted from the rooftops almost. If more people had understood these points then perhaps Larry Summers wouldn’t have lost his job.

A fascinating little piece of research from the British Psychological Society showing a difference in the way that men and women judge the looks of the opposite sex. As when we looked at sex itself I’d love to know whether our EQSQ personality tests could help to explain this in more detail.

The basic finding was that you get different results when asking the question “hot or not” depending upon whether the picture shows someone else as well, and the expression on their face. So, show a picture of a man to a woman and you’ll get one result. Show the same picture, but with the addition of another woman smiling at it and it is rated as more attractive by women. If the second woman’s expression is neutral it is rated as less attractive. Take the same pictures and show them to men and you get the opposite results. If a woman is smiling at the man then men will rate that man as less attractive.

To be honest I don’t think this really does have anything to do with our personality tests. This is more about sexual competition, something which is determined at a far more basic level of our brains than the differences between the “male” and “female” brain types that we discuss. This isn’t, I think, about systemizing or empathy, but about competition for mates, something determined by quite another part of our brains.

Receptionists are one of the largest occupational groups in the country, with some 1.1 million people doing the job. I think we all know what they do, don’t we? Meet people as they enter an office or place of work, deal with customer queries, route telephone calls and so on? Also, as the BLS tells us the job is expected grow more swiflty than most others in the years to come. This is largely to do with the fact that the shift from manufacturing (where there are few receptionists) to service (where there are many) employment is expected to continue.

That description of the job makes it fairly easy to place, using our EQSQ personality tests, those who would be good at the job. Those with the female brain type, strong empathic skills. Just like most jobs that entail dealing with the general public really.

There’s no specific training for the job, at least not more than a high school diploma and general literacy and computer skills: certainly no college degree is required. However, over and above that cheerful and bubbly character that helps, and the empathic skills from the personality tests, there is a good argument that if you want to have your pick of the jobs (and to possibly progress as well) then maybe a secretarial course, perhaps even a junior college degree in office management would be useful. Remember, the more qualified you are, the better the choice you will have about where you work.

By the standards of our EQSQ personality tests it really isn’t all that difficult to work out what sort of brain type, male, female or balanced, is needed here. We just need to add one little piece of information to the common understanding. Real estate brokers (agents are those who work for brokers, brokers can be independent), as the BLS points out, do not spend all of their time trying to sell property. As, if not more, important is persuading sellers to list a property with the broker. As you can imagine, this requires a large dose of the empathic skills, for you’re asking someone to trust you to get the very best price possible for their major (possibly only) asset.

However, to be successful in the career takes a lot more than just good sales skills. A great deal of detailed knowledge of the area and neighborhood is necessary and to really advance, intimate knowledge of financing techniques to aid the buyer. These are more systemizing skills so we would probably say that the balanced brain type is best here.

Every state has a licencing procedure to become either a broker or agent. No college degree is required however there are over 1,000 institutions that offer college degrees or majors in real estate. Many of the larger firms like to recruit people who have at least some college courses, if not the full college degree, in the subject.

It’s worth remembering that the real estate jobs market is subject to booms and busts. When interest rates go up or the economy slows, jobs can be hard to find. On the other hand, in a booming market very good money can be made as most income is from commissions, the faster the houses sell, the more the money rolls in.