On the Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People

I loved this book. It isn’t anything too extensive, but it helped me see that I don’t have to land a job in a classically creative field to do serious creative work. One of its best features is its use of Holland types, which lets it take seriously the jobs with real creative content even when they aren’t classically artistic. Most of the book is given over to reassuring the reader that they don’t have to suffer — an important point, since one of the strongest predictors of job satisfaction is the overlap between a job’s content and one’s own skills; when tasks and abilities are misaligned, everything feels wrong and each day becomes a war of attrition. It’s brief, about 150 pages of original content, with the rest a list of jobs (with Holland codes, descriptions, and median salaries) where creativity matters — teaching, research, web work, the making of manual goods, performance, marketing, and much more. I skimmed most of that section, stopping on the occupations I found interesting. I also took reassurance in remembering that the list isn’t comprehensive: Eikleberry included positions where “A,” for artistic, appears in one of the three letters of the Holland code, but there are other creative jobs that demand real artistic ability while leaning more on other skills — an “educational consultant,” code SCE or thereabouts, calls for genuinely creative solutions. The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People is one of the better places to start for anyone looking to break out of the standard, socially acceptable roles. It’s illuminating, if a bit dated now; I hope there’s a new edition before long.