What’s your Career Patronus? (And, what difference does it make?)

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, there’s a good chance you’ve tried an online quiz to identify your ‘Patronus’ – the powerful magical guardian in the form of an animal or mythical creature that matches your personality.

You answer a bunch of questions aimed at discovering something about your temperament – for example, choose from Dawn, Dusk, or Midnight. You have 3 seconds… go!

At the end of the process, you’re presented with your Patronus – and for many people, it’s one that they instantly like and feel connected to. Magic!

Well, not really. You know how this works. The quiz discovers your preferences, and then matches you with a pre-existing creature that aligns with that. And just like all the other Harry Potter fans, you get assigned to one of 142 existing animals/creatures.

Which means, there are millions of people out there who all have - for example - a hedgehog as their Patronus.

And here’s the problem… how many of the millions of hedgehog people are really alike? Would they all make good crisis negotiators? Bristly on the outside, warm underneath, and their instinct under real pressure is to curl into a ball and wait for the problem to go away. Some of them, maybe. Most hedgehogs I know would rather be left alone in a hedge.

You see the problem. There are plenty of hedgehogs in hedge funds, and plenty who'd be miserable there. The type tells you what someone is like. It doesn't tell you what they're for.

Many approaches to career counselling use the same logic: identify someone’s type - ISFJ, ‘Type 3’, Artistic-Realistic – and you can point them in the right direction. ‘Hufflepuff’ anyone?

To see why this falls short, it helps to remember how a Patronus actually works. Your Patronus isn’t assigned to you, like the Sorting Hat assigns new students to one of the school houses.

It’s conjured from your happiest memories – memories that reveal what you’re most deeply attached to. And everyone’s memories are unique, as are the reasons that particular memory has stayed with you, more than the millions of other moments you’ve lived.

The career counselling approach I take works the way the Patronus works, not the way the quiz does.

I don't start with a test. I start with your story. In the first session we talk about the people, experiences and stories that have stayed with you. Your work history comes into it too, but later, and as evidence rather than as the starting point. I'm not looking for a resume. I'm listening for what keeps turning up.

Because here's the thing about the moments that stay with you: they didn't stay by accident. Of the millions of moments you've lived, a handful are vivid, and they've hung around because they say something about what you've been paying attention to all along, what you've been trying to solve, protect, build, or put right. About what matters to you.

That's your material, and nobody else has it. It also can't be prepared for, which is rather the point. The most useful things people say in the first session are the ones they didn't know they were going to say.

Between sessions I work with that material and write up a life portrait: a picture of the hidden thread running through your story, the recurring concerns and ways of engaging with the world. In the second session, we explore and fine-tune that portrait.

It's a bit like stepping back from a painting you've been standing too close to. People often tell me it's the first time their career has made sense as a whole, rather than as a series of disconnected events.

And then, in the third session, we turn that into direction. Not one prescribed job, and not a list of 142 options. Usually it's a few possibilities that each give expression to something that has mattered to you for a long time, which makes the choice between them a much easier one to make.

A quiz can tell you what you're like, and put you in a box with a few million other hedgehogs. Your story can tell you what you're for. One is assigned; the other is conjured, and it's conjured out of you.

Your Career Patronus isn't one of 142. It's one of one. The only way to find it is the way the wizards do: go looking in the memories that have stayed with you, and see what steps out.

If that sounds worth a try, I offer a free 30-minute introductory conversation. No preparation, and no quiz. You can also read more about why assessments can't tell you everything or what actually happens in a session.