JOCRF

Aptitude testing can be helpful to people in many stages of life; upcoming high school graduates, college students searching for the right major, mid-life crisis sufferers (hello!), recently retired...really, anyone who wants to identify their strongest skills in an attempt to make decisions about what to do with their life in regards to education, career, pastimes, volunteer efforts, you know...anything.

A couple of Doughboy's buddies participated a few years back, and both provided glowing recommendations. So, I saved my money and invested in the testing last March. Three days are required. Day 1 and 2 are 4-5 hours of testing and day 3 is a 90 minute consultation.

I L-O-V-E-D the experience! The researchers are amazing women who I would love to spend time with personally or professionally. The tests are very fun...I really wanted to take them home and share them with my family. The lessons learned are...well...I guess it's different for everyone.

I'd read an article written by someone who had scored high in nearly every aptitude. There was something about what I read that gave me a lot of anxiety...I was worried that it might be my story as well. See, my hope was to find my one or two strongest aptitudes to assist in narrowing down my options. However, I scored high in a majority of the aptitudes and found myself as direction-less as I began.

One thing was clear, my current career path was evidently a poor choice. It took a year of increasing stress and frustration for me to leave such an obviously bad job for me. And here I am with a computer printout full of promise but feeling completely useless. I'm meeting with the researchers again tomorrow with 2 intentions:

1.) When I received the results of my test, I was "married" to my job and had a hard time seeing myself doing anything else. I also was too terrified to do something as crazy as leaving a stable career...so I didn't get as much out of the consultation discussion. Now that I find myself free to do absolutely anything, I'm optimistic that I'll be able to ask better questions and hear better answers.

2.) On my 3rd day, I was asked if I had interest in working for the Foundation. I was absolutely interested, but the geography was my only hold-up. As much as I would love to return to Colorado some day, I'm still convinced that my marrying odds are best in SLC and I just wasn't ready to make the change. I did send a letter of intent to the director, and took her silence as an indication that there wasn't an opportunity for me at the time. I've thought of the opportunity many times over the year and want to discuss the possibility of opening a center in SLC.

I'm optimistic that tomorrow evening I'll have the beginnings of a plan for the next steps...(I hope! I hope! I hope!)