Vive la Difference

As the economics type that I am I’ll admit to a certain distaste for urban and regional planners. There are those of us who agree with Joanne Jacobs (the doyenne of the discipline) that urban planning is something of an oxymoron: cities evolve, they’re not planned, at least, not if they’re going to be decent places to live in. Having said that, of course this is a minority view and every local, regional and State government across the country has its department of planners. They work to plan (how did you guess?) how the area will develop, from the simple things like where the fire station should be to the complex, like how to ensure environmental protection while still allowing for (even promoting) economic growth.

To work in this field you’ll need at least one college degree, almost certainly two. There are some entry level jobs available for those with just the one college degree but to advance, or in fact even be able to apply for the vast majority of positions, you’ll need a second degree, a Master’s in urban planning (or something related and applicable).

It may well be worth it too: the BLS says job growth is going to be about average over the next decade but I have my doubts about that. I have a feeling that the growing green movement is going to lead to a great deal more planning in the future. The pay is pretty good to, some $52,000 on average.

As for our EQSQ personality tests this is certainly a job for the systemizers or male brain types amongst us. Learning how the system that is a city works and then planning how to make it better (or even to plan one from scratch, as happens with many new neighborhoods) is pretty much a definition of systemizing, isn’t it?

The career of travel agent attracts many people who aren’t all that worried about the pay that’s on offer. The perks, the extras, the cheap (and sometimes free) travel makes it very attractive all on its own which is why, sadly, the pay is not actually very good, some $27,000 a year on average. But then it’s also true that many people work in order to be able to travel, so in that sense it’s a very good deal indeed.

The actual job itself involves advising people who are thinking about their vacation of the various possible options and then helping them to book the package that they’ve decided upon. Until recently the usual entry level requirements were no more than a friendly manner and a high school diploma but this is now changing. As the internet has enabled people to research for themselves the questions they are asking travel agents are becoming more complex. Thus the desired training has become so as well. Very few employers demand a college degree in tourism services but most would now like people who have taken at least some parts of a college degree. Over and beyond that classes in geography and basic accounting (and computing) are also desired.

There’s also a number of vocational schools offering programs of much shorter length than a college degree but much more focused on the training that is actually needed to be a travel agent.

As to our EQSQ personality tests the job is another of those which requires great attention to detail and also interaction with and selling to the public at large. As both systemizing and empathizing attributes are therefore required this is a job probably best done by those with the balanced brain type.

The huge and wide spread of what actually is encompassed by the phrase “top executive” means that almost any generalization will be wide of the mark, contain numerous exceptions. There’s two which aren’t which we’ll come to.

Top executives are those responsible for the general direction of a company or other organization. They deal with the grand strategy if you like, rather than the boring day to day details. There’s any number of ways of getting to those giddy heights of general management. In industries like retail there’s a tradition of promoting from within the company, so it’s entirely possible for those who started as stockroom clerks and the like to rise to the top, with or without a college degree. In others, like say university management, you’ll have a doctorate level college degree in the subject you teach before you even think about going into management. Other industries have different standards: in much of manufacturing or finance for example, it’s common enough for someone to have something in the liberal arts as their first college degree, followed up a few years later by one in business management or administration.

So there’s really no hard and fast rules except for the two I mentioned earlier. The first is that top executives are very well paid (although they also work very long hours), those at the very top potentially earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

The second is that this is, by the standards of our EQSQ personality tests, something for those of us with the balanced brain type. It requires huge attention to detail but also the ability to listen to and motivate others. That’s pretty much a definition of a mixture of systemizing and empathic qualities, of the male and female brain types.

Tool and die makers are sometimes known as the aristocrats of the manufacturing workforce. It’s certainly true that they’re probably the most skilled of all of the blue collar jobs out there. Rather than making things, they make the machines, molds and so on that are then used to manufacture those other things. As such their attention to detail has to be much greater than the general production worker in manufacturing.

The training is as complex as the job itself. If you follow this path you’ll expect to spend 3-5 years in an apprenticeship, followed by several more years of gaining experience and skills on the job before you’ll be considered fully trained. There’s no college degrees involved here, although much of the classroom work that is part of the apprentice schemes takes place in community and technical colleges. It is however possible to advance up and away from tool and die making by getting a college degree over and on top of the apprentice schemes. Rather than being a tool maker, there are those who go on to be tool designers, and the two skills, the higher engineering ones from the college degree course, plus the technical ones from the hands on experience, complement each other to a great degree.

Who would be best at this job, judging by the criteria of our EQSQ personality tests? I think it’s prety clear that it’s the male brain types, the systemizers. The tolerances worked to are at minimum one ten thousandth of an inch: that’s detail for you, eh?

I find this an interesting description of the job prospects for tellers.

The basic job itself we all know about, tellers are the people who work the counters at the bank. It’s not all that well paid, ($21,000 a year on average) but that is in fact pretty good for the entry level requirements. No college degree is required (although some starting do have a college degree), usually just basic proficiency with computers, a High School diploma and basic numeracy. One thing that’s interesting is that many banks like to promote from within the company, so there is definitely a career progression possible up the management structure of the bank.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, is this a male or a female brain job? Certainly, the majority of tellers are women now but that, as we know, doesn’t mean that it’s a female brain job at all: it might be the regular availability of part time positions that does that. The job itself is very detail oriented, so we might think it’s a male brain thing. However, by its definition, it’s also dealing with the public all day so it’s also female brain oriented. It’s probably for those with the balanced brain type from our personality tests.

The thing that interested me most is that a few years ago the banks were closing down the branch offices and replacing them simply with ATMs. This meant that job prospects were very bad. However, they’ve now realized that people like to have the contact at the bank, the human touch (and it also allows the tellers to sell further products to the customers) so even though technology is marching on, job prospects are actually pretty good.

As we go through the various different types of teaching job that you can have we’re seeing some variation in the skills likely to be required. Special education teachers are those who deal with the children who have special needs, obviously enough, but these can range from those students with autism or other severe disabilities all the way through to those who have a problem in only one relatively minor area: like dyslexia or even just bad eyesight, meaning that a certain amount of extra help is required.

Such teaching goes on in all of the different levels of the school system as well, meaning that you can specialize in both an area and an age group. Such teaching jobs require in every state a license for this specific type of teaching. To get that you’ll need at least one college degree: most insist upon a second college degree as well, a Master’s.

As for our EQSQ personality tests, you’ll find that the more severe the disability and the lower the age group the more empathic you’ll need to be to deal with the job. Teaching the classically autistic is akin to nursing while at the other end of the spectrum, with the more minor problems, it’s more of a systemizing task. So whether male or female brained by the personality tests, there’s somewhere on this job spectrum for you.

The money is quite good, in the $40-$45,000 a year range but the real rewards come from seeing the pupils develop, as is so often true of any kind of teaching.

Quite why the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses “self-enrichment” to describe this type of teaching I’m not quite sure. It rather carries overtones of chanting in groups and that sort of thing. But this isn’t actually what they mean, at all. It’s all those classes in things that we find amusing or interesting, from photography to baking bread, basket weaving to dance. While some of these are indeed taught to school students (and this provide full time jobs to their teachers, like music for example) the vast majority of this sort of education is aimed at adults.

As such, and because the students are almost always paying directly to be there, they are an enthusiastic audience, which is what makes this type of teaching so enjoyable. It’s also true that it is usually done part time, by experts in the specific field.

There are usually no formal qualifications required at all, certainly no college degrees. To teach that is: it’s often necessary to have a college degree to become an expert, of course. You’ll find that for most who do this sort of teaching it’s an add on, an extra thing that they do, rather than a full time career. For example, a Master Baker might take few classes a year and teach them how to make bread: it can be most enriching passing on your own skills and expertise to those who want to learn.

As for our EQSQ personality tests, those who do well here come from all ends of the spectrum from systemizing to empathic. For it’s the personality traits that make them experts in their fields (and as we know, these vary hugely) that make them good teachers.

This is another one of those jobs where the sorting into male and female brain type, into systemizing and empathizing, takes place within the profession, rather than the profession itelf being suitable for people of one type or the other.

The reason for this is that there is such variation in what it is that teachers actually do. At preschool, for example, the emphasis is on getting children to play together, to draw, to take an interest in the society around them (the actual word used is to “socialize” them when what is meant is civilize). Helping and aiding with this is clearly a female brain (No! this is not the same as saying female gender!) or empathizing talent, to be able to do this.

Teaching changes as children get older. At elementary school there is more teaching than simply managing them and then at high school different teachers take different subjects. As you might imagine, teachers tend to be of the personality types that best suits their subject: arts teachers more empathizing, science more systemizing.

The education you need to become a teacher (hey, you only work 9 months of the year!) almost always requires a college degree and often, on top of your first one, another year or more to get the specialist teaching qualification as well, sometimes a further college degree in education. It can definitely be worth it, recent research has shown that teachers are, per hour they work, some of the best paid professionals in the country, often ahead of lawyers.

Postsecondary teachers are all of those who teach students beyond high school. As a result this classification is so wide as to be almost meaningless. It includes the experienced mechanic who is teaching you about maintaining an engine at a vocational school and the top Professors in the Ivy League. A pretty wide band I think you’ll agree? So it’s important to note that not everyone here is teaching college degrees.

The training for these jobs is just as varied as the jobs themselves. To teach a college degree program you of course need a college degree youself. But even then there are gradations: you need a Doctorate to become a tenured professor at a four year college while to teach simple classes at a community college leading to a two year college degree then your own simple Bachelor’s will be sufficient (even though a Master’s would perhaps be better). To teach at the many vocational and trade schools, a college degree isn’t required at all. Rather, skill and experience in the subject being taught is.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, the wide range of possible teaching and research careers (for at the universities, this is more about research than teaching) means that all different personality types, from the highly systemizing to the empathic, will find their appropriate place. The systemizers might be teaching math, the empathizers nursing for example. In fact, we’d expect to see the spread of male and female brain attributes over the teachers to mimic that we find in the actual subjects they’re teaching.

This job is really rather different from the general experience of teaching and as such can be immensely rewarding. Regular teachers in schools are trying to do two things: impart some knowledge, of course, but also to control and socialize the youngsters in their care. With adult literacy teaching (teaching adults who cannot read and write to do so) and remedial (teaching adults to pass the GED for example) the situation is as I say different. Everyone is there because they want to be, indeed, are desperate to pick up the education. A refreshing change indeed.

This means that as far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned things are slightly different. Regular teachers need a great deal of empathy, those teaching adults less so. So if you want to teach but find that you have, by those personality tests, a balanced or male type brain, it might be that you’ll want to look into that whole area of adult education.

There are a lot of people who volunteer in this area and there are usually (except in certain publicly funded programs) no specific educational requirements. However, for almost all of the paid positions, a college degree is required. It’s usually not all that important what that college degree is in: it certainly doesn’t have to be in adult education. It’s more a mark of having reached a certain educational level yourself than it is that you have been taught how to teach adults.

The money isn’t all that good, averaging around $18 an hour, but then as we’ve noted before here, jobs that provide a great deal of job satisfaction tend not to provide a great deal of money. The good money tends to go to those jobs people don’t actually enjoy doing.