Careers

An article in Attention Magazine ( Career Choices and ADHD, April. 2011) provided excellent advice for young adults who are searching for an appropriate career path, in which the author offered splendid comments and wisdom for young adults.

Chris Dendy ( page 22 and 23) advised young adult and teens with ADHD:

         

Identify skills and interests

          Get vocational testing

          Try computerized career programs

It might be helpful to take a personality test such a Myers-Briggs  

    Personality Inventory

          Explore courses in college and meet professionals in various fields.

We probably broke everyone one of those recommendations when my husband got a job. After all that was his primary motivation: get a job before we got married at the end of the month. He only had three weeks, even though we had been engaged  much longer than that.

My husband did narrow his interests down to being a chef to being a potter with his own art studio, or owning a farm and run it the organic method with much help from Mother Earth News.

He attended college, several of them, in fact, from which he dropped courses or received low grades. He majored in business as his father wanted him to do. Actually one of our former professors counseled me not to marry him because by age 23 I had earned my Master’s degree. “He is marrying you because you have your graduate degree, and you can support   him.”

He found himself accepting a job from a major aircraft company, even though he said he would never work for one. His dad was an aeronautical engineer and pilot, and my husband said he competed with airplanes all his life, so why work with them?

He retired from that company after nearly 37 years employment, where he spent 31 years as a technical writer. Several days presented unspoken torment for him because of the care to detail enmeshed in it.

I think it was the constant changes and challenges in technology that kept him from running out the door, and the fact we had small children.

He often says, “It was the grace of God and a praying wife that kept me there.”

I think it was his sense of responsibility and fear of failure that kept him hammering away on life’s anvil, one dull thud at a time.

What we failed to understand in our earlier days stems from the notions of positive choices, positive self-image, and matching careers with personal interests. Husband failed to think in terms of his strengths. He did not have a positive opinion of himself.

Notice the first point on Dendy’s list mentioned above. Career or vocational testing or even coaching could have helped him identify his personal interests. At the time, he loved to cook. Would he have learned to hate it if he had to cook all day long?

He also loved to garden and work in the dirt. Might he have sustained an interest in landscaping or farming?  After all a farmer is a records keeper, and Husband is not.

He enjoys reading history and sharing trivial facts.  Would he have been a historian and academic in the field of history?

He loved the study of the human body. Would medicine have matched his interests more? The medical field offers variety on a daily basis. It contained dramatic and high-energy moments. As a man-of-the-minute, Husband remains calm in the face of emergency, and he sees the body as a functioning system much as I see a car as a mechanical system.

I could see him being successful somewhere in the medical field.

Actually, he has taken opportunity of early retirement to pursue a new career in the medical field. He plans to do work in medical coding and billing. As a cancer survivor, he hopes to specialize in work that registers tumors (if I have it correct).

Numbers have meaning for him. He can memorize numbers that have more than seven digits. He coded airplane parts for many years; now he can code body parts.

He sees it as a complete match.