Career Booster Shot

Tonight was the last night of my "Career Booster Shot" class.  Overall, it was a very good class - I'm motivated and more confident, and I'm glad my pal SDF asked me to take the class with her.  It made me think about some things in my life and career that I normally would not have thought about.  Most of tonight's class was devoted to going over the results of the [long] career assessment test we took last week.  The results were a 20 page report about me and what types of jobs I would be best suited for.  The first half of the report was about my personality and my strong points, all based on my test results.  The last half of the report was a very detailed listing of jobs that I would be best suited for, also based on my test results. All in all, the results of the test weren't really a shock.  But I will say that one job that I had the highest score on was a job that I was passed over/turned down at work last fall -- corporate trainer.  When I read that in the report, I immediately nudged SDF and had her look at the paper while I was holding back the laughter.  Maybe I'll take my test into work tomorrow and show that to the guy that interviewed me for the corporate trainer position. 

The other career choices where I had high scores were interesting - a few were funny.  One amusing one was "religious leader."  They didn't elaborate, so I don't know if they meant religious leader as in a cult leader like David Koresh or as in Pat Robertson.  I didn't score at all on "minister" so this job has me a bit confused. 

I tied with the corporate trainer job on two other jobs - musician and writer.  How funny is that?  Two things that I truly love to do in life and this test tells me that I should consider a career on those areas.  Imagine that.  While I've always dreamed of being a musician and getting paid big bucks for it, I honestly never thought about making it my actual only career - I've always thought of it as a hobby or as something I love to do in my spare time.  The same with writing.  I love writing in TWIT and I love when something I write here will cause one of my faithful readers to take the time to comment on it.  But I'd never considered writing as a career.  Even when I started my novel years ago, I never thought of actually making money writing it; I just wrote it because I thought I had a good idea and because nobody else had written a novel about that idea before. To my knowledge, the novel idea (no pun intended) still hasn't been written about, so I can still pull it off if I can write fast and get it published. 

I thought alot about the test results on my way home from class tonight. The test results showed me something that I knew all along, but that I also keep forgetting - I can't run from the gifts and talents that God gave me.  God blessed me with the gift of music and writing, and maybe this is His way of telling me that I should explore the possibilities of using those gifts and talents as my career.  This class gave me confidence and reassurance - music and writing are things that I've always loved to do, and I didn't really need a test to tell me that.