Job Inner-View

Relax, I kept repeating like a mantra. There’s no reason for those sweaty palms.

You are not back in school. This is not a final exam that will determine your grade in your toughest class, which will in turn decide your grade point average for the entire year.

This is a good test, a benign test. It will reveal your natural strengths. It will help you plot your future career path, keep you from making boneheaded decisions, perhaps one day enhance your finances.

Try as I might, I could not get over the idea that I was being tested in some cosmic sense. Memories of years of all-nighters and cramming and striving for good grades swept over me. Would I measure up? What if, heaven forbid, my results registered no natural strengths, only weaknesses? What if my boss found out? Insecurity welled up. I hunkered down, using a pencil with a very sharp point to make dots inside the dozens of circles on the page in front of me. What on earth, I wondered, will this strange foray into pointillism expose about me?

One morning in late April, with this special report on training and education in mind, I drove to the Santa Ana office of the Highlands Program.

The organization, based in Atlanta but with offices nationwide, is one of many that administer tests and workshops designed to help individuals evaluate their innate abilities. The idea is to help students or working adults figure out what to do with their lives.

The tests are part of a holistic approach to making career decisions. Building on theories of several pioneers in the field, Highland’s co-founders--Don Hutcheson, an entrepreneur with a background in advertising and publishing, and Bob McDonald, a psychologist--developed a multifaceted program that also looks at skills (or learned abilities), interests, personal style, family needs, values and personal vision or goals.

My assignment was to tackle only the tests (the first segment of the program), receive a few hours of feedback and write about the experience. To a baby boomer in mid-career in a fast-mutating industry, it sounded like a good plan.

But a few minutes into the 3 1/2-hour experience, I began to think that I had made a serious mistake. By the third exercise, I was becoming forlorn and wondering whether I could bolt for the door without anyone’s noticing. By the time it was over, I was also feeling frustrated and a tad stupid--not to mention physically weak and woefully uncoordinated.

Not to worry, program director Michael H. Foust, an Orange County psychologist, assured me later in an e-mail. “I was totally humbled by it,” he said of his own test experience.

*

These tests are not intended to be the SATs revisited. There are no pesky mathematics equations, no literary passages to absorb. It’s not a test of what you know or can figure out but what you can do--easily and naturally. Depending on an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, portions of the Highlands battery can seem a bit like torture at times. Of course, other parts--the “easy” parts--can be almost enjoyable.

Abilities, the program notes say, are our permanent set of talents. They stabilize in a person at age 14 or so and are essentially the same throughout a person’s working years. A true ability is something that comes easily and is not something one can learn or improve through practice.

To ensure that these tests measure an isolated ability--and to make sure that the test taker can’t use other skills to help solve the problems--most of the tests are timed.

Consider this one: You have 30 seconds to memorize a list of 15 nonsense words and their common English “meanings,” such as “cup” or “boy.” Then you look at a blank piece of blue paper. Then you must try to recall the English words and match them to the list of nonsense words. Ugh.

Or this one: Spend 15 seconds studying a connect-the-dots design. Look at a blank sheet. Now turn to a page with only the dots and re-create the design. Sure, you can guess. But any stray, incorrect lines will be subtracted from your score. Eek.

And this monster: Take 30 seconds to eyeball a list of numbers, each with six digits. Turn to the ubiquitous blank page. Then on the next sheet fill in the blanks with all the numbers you can remember. I settled for memorizing the first digit of each series, thinking that perhaps I should be flipping burgers for a living.

When we got to a long section on visualizing spatial relations--which tests one’s ability (or inability) to see three dimensions when only two are evident--I just about snapped. Spatial relations have always been a weakness of mine. I just could not figure out how to twist figures in my mind to see how they’d look from another angle.

Through the years, I had read that girls tend to be weaker than boys in this area, and that was all the excuse I needed. As the seconds ticked away in the Highlands test room, I began to guess, circling answers with abandon--and with absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Surprisingly, I was more comfortable with another, more theoretical exercise dealing with spatial relations. Picture a square sheet of paper, folded different ways. Imagine a pencil being poked through the folded paper at a particular point. Once the sheet is unfolded, where on a grid would the punched holes be? Fun, different. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

When we donned headsets for three tests on distinguishing tone, rhythm and pitch, I relaxed--until a gardener revved up his leaf blower right outside the window. Despite my tendency to be easily distracted--a trait confirmed in spades by my test results--I pulled these off with some confidence.

An eagle eye from way back, I also felt pretty good about the visual speed exercise. You had to quickly look at one combination of digits and letters (say, 1 E 5 5 B) and then determine whether a combination just opposite was the same or different (say, 1 5 E 5 B).

Soon after, I felt downright deflated again by an observation test. Powers of observation are rather crucial tools for a reporter, after all. In this sample, we had a short time to look at a montage of everyday objects--a comb, a thimble, a stamp, a screwdriver, etc. Then we viewed the blank sheet and then a similar montage. But we had to say which items were new, which had been removed and which had been changed. Highly disconcerting. My self-esteem was headed for the Dumpster.

For sheer torment, though, nothing could top the exercise requiring me to put dots in the centers of circles going across, then down, then back across a page. Row after row after row. For five long minutes. No touching the sides of the circles. My wrist stiffened. My mind glazed over. My eyeballs wobbled. I felt like screaming.

Not surprisingly for a journalist, I felt confident when it came to various wordplay exercises--word association, multiple-choice definitions (for words such as “gnarled,” “feckless” and “contumacy”), and a test of creativity requiring me to answer a fantastical, nonsensical question.

The battery finished with a real ego bruiser: the Dynamometer. This device--gripped first with one hand, then the other--is designed to measure not strength but one’s energy, stamina, drive and persistence. All I could say was: Uh-oh.

With a week to stew over the significance to my future of all this, I waited impatiently for the feedback session with Foust. Back to Santa Ana I went, braced for the worst on spatial relations and number memory, but hopeful that Foust would not urge me to chuck my chosen profession with the greatest possible haste.

No worries there. Writing and creativity are long suits, he told me.

Foust, sitting at a round table in a quiet little office, tape-recorded the session for me.

Scores for the Highlands battery are given in percentiles--with 0 to 35 low, 35 to 64 medium and above 64 high. But, Foust said, try to suspend the notion that high is good and low is bad. Low scores give as much information.

It took some time for this to sink in, but I finally got it. For example, I scored high in some areas that indicate I like a stimulating environment, thrive on brainstorming and can generate ideas quickly. That sounded grand until he explained that those traits also mean I’m easily distracted and am therefore best suited to short-term projects. (The same mental restlessness is at play, unfortunately, if I waken in the middle of the night: Undisciplined ideas immediately begin coursing through my brain.)

About a few things, there were no doubts: I am a generalist who prefers diverse activities and an extrovert who thrives on interaction and a fast pace. I am a team player who enjoys sharing the work experience. I am empathetic and intuitive about how others will feel and can influence the group’s thinking. I can think abstractly and enjoy planning for the long term. I can solve problems easily and communicate my conclusions to others in a compelling way.

Those traits, Foust said, make me a good prospect for teaching or sales. Combined with a strong vocabulary, they also would make me an ideal manager--except for my high ranking in a category that indicates I might put too many demands on others.

Foust spent a lot of time talking about my “driving abilities”--the most profound influences on career choices. People can experience career dissatisfaction, he pointed out, for two reasons: They are asked to perform a set of tasks that demand abilities that do not come naturally, or, even more discouraging, they have abilities that are not tapped at all.

About a third of Highlands test takers learn something revolutionary about themselves, Foust said. For me, it was the strength of my musical ability. Perhaps, he said, I should consider writing about the music industry or entertainment. Given my strength in design memory, I could also make a good choreographer, he said.

Other suitable positions: fund-raiser, clothing designer, photographer, lobbyist, literary agent, publisher, diplomat, academic dean, psychologist or politician (no thanks!). Jobs I would not be suited for: accountant, banker, stockbroker, travel agent, lawyer or doctor.

For now, I’ll stick with this one--with some refreshing reassurance that I’m in an environment that fulfills many of my needs. But the test has certainly given me things to think about.

Many other veterans of the Highlands battery and seminars have switched jobs.

“It answered so many questions about why I wasn’t jumping up to go to work every morning,” said Patricia Kusek, a national account manager for Duke Power Co. in Charlotte, N.C. Armed with the self-knowledge she gleaned, Kusek went after her new sales-related job after years of writing and training in human resources. “I couldn’t be happier,” she said.

Every few years, Foust noted, businesses must retool. And so must human beings. After a decade of cost cutting, corporate America is scrambling to redefine the work relationship. The contract has changed. No longer the cared-for minions of paternalistic organizations, workers must grow up and assume responsibility for managing their careers. For their own well-being, they should find a way of working in the least taxing, most efficient way possible.

A goal is to help individuals find work that draws as much as possible on abilities as opposed to learned skills. “Using skills is like working from a battery that needs recharging,” Foust said. “The more you operate from a skills base, the more likely you are to burn out. The more you can work from an abilities base, the more resources you’ll have left over.”

The cost of the Highlands Program ranges from $500 to $1,500. For more information, visit Foust’s Web site at https://www.thehighlandsprogram-ca.com