Career Visioning

Here at hahvahd, we believe in developing our people and putting them through extremely expensive seeming executive development programs where we can really reach in and understand who we are at our core so we can understand each other better.
In this particular case, it was a multi-step system:

1) we took an exam like MBTI (Career Leader professional report) but more questions and in the end, it told you what you were interested in, what you thought you were strong at and what job seems to be a good fit in terms of interest. You were compared against a huge amount of data (200,000 business professional profile and 400 mba schools).

My results were:
Highs:
Application of Technology - interested in learning about and using new technologies. Enjoy analyzing and designing business processes such as production and operations systems
Creative production - Enjoy brainstorming novel ideas for products and services. Prefer early, creative stages of businesses to later "maintenance" phase

Lows:
Quantitative analysis - prefer solving business issues by "running the numbers." Enjoy building computer models, doing financial and market research analysis
Managing people and relationships - interested working with and through others on a day-to-day basis.

Best career path machines:
Management in Science and Engineering - 99% match
Management of New Product Development - 99% match
Venture Capital - 97% match
...
Investment banking - 9% match

Basically, I told it a bunch of stuff, and it told me back the same bunch of stuff.

2) Visioning exercise
Tim Butler, the founder of CareerLeader tried to hypnotize us by having us close our eyes and repeating the following over and over again: "You are where you want to be 5 years from now. What are you doing? Where are you? Who is around you? What's the office like? Are there plants? Who does this type of thing?"

I imagined... Ally McBeal's office and minions coming up to me to ask me to sign things.
Habits of aligning one's goals with societal images of success die hard...

3) Career Teams
From 9am-3pm on a Saturday, we met with a random group of people we didn't know to talk about what we really wanted to do in life. At the beginning of the day, we were given a list of 100 random jobs and told to instinctively select 12 of them that job out at us. The key was to ignore whether our skills make us best suited to the job but to circle things that just looked interesting. After we selected them, we ranked them and broke into our groups.

Our team was told to say what Themes, Images and Tensions our list of jobs seemed to have without us intervening. After they finished with discussing, our second year MBA helped up to come up with our vision, strategy and tactics to get the job that suits us best.

My main takeaway from this is: I'm a lot more idealist still than I thought.

I've put everything we worked on here: