As part of the Job Skills class that I tutored in prison, the students were asked to take a series of personality and interest assessments, if for no other reason than to move them toward some sort of self-awareness about how they interact with others. Of course, I took them right alongside the students (as did the instructor) and when it came to my “Color Q Personality Self-Assessment,” it turned out that I was a primary “blue” and a secondary “red” (you can be a gold, blue, red, or green). It turns out that, according to the assessors, “blues” are only 10% of the population, in contrast to golds at 47%, red at 27%, and greens at 17%. O rare blood! I’m not sure, however, that my blue personality is going to do anything to help me in my future employment, especially as a former felon.
Here’s what they tell me that “blues” are:
Theoretical, competitive, and always driven to acquire more knowledge and competence, Blues are unequaled when it comes to dealing with complex, theoretical issues and designing new systems. As natural skeptics, their first reaction is to criticize and set their benchmarks against which they measure everyone and everything. They are highly precise in thought and language and future oriented, trusting only logic, not the rules or procedures of the past. Blues are visionary and do best in positions requiring strategic thinking. Then they move on with little interest in maintenance.
Career Match, Shoya Zichy.
OK, then. I was a college professor, so I suppose that fits. You know, the acquiring knowledge, the love of innovation, the trust in logic. All that gets me squat, however, as a formerly incarcerated person looking for a job … or even trying to live a life. After all, as you have already seen from this blog, if rules and procedures are foolish, I’m happy to say so and tell you, precisely, why. That leads me afoul of the Golds, or those who “value procedures [and] respect the chain of command” no matter how inane those things may be. The Golds are 46% of the total population, but really 95% of the injustice system as far as I can see, so we are more or less natural enemies. Besides that, I’m a secondary “red” which is supposed to mean that I “get things done and handle crisis better than most” but also need “careers that provide freedom, action, variety, and the unexpected.” So there’s strike two, when if comes to success in the injustice system. If people could truly handle crises, we wouldn’t have a reductionist, dangerous, and useless prison industrial complex.
As for seeking out new, post-prison employment, it pretty clear that hiring managers and their Artificial Intelligence (stress the “artificial” and mock the “intelligence”) Gatekeepers are definitely not in the market for Blue/Reds. I’m 40 job application rejections in and counting. Most of them don’t even have the courtesy to respond with an email rejection; they just ghost you. So far none has felt the need to explain why they don’t want an old, overqualified Red/Blue like me. If someone did that, I supposed that would make them a Green, who are said to be “empathetic, humanistic, and creative,” which apparently are no longer values in human resources. It makes me more than a little frustrated, but the search goes on. I will say, though, that I’m trying to brace myself for a long and disappointing search because it’s pretty clear that nobody wants strategic vision from a felon.
It’s a lot of fun to play around with these kinds of Myers-Briggs style tests, and find your “place” in humanity, but the kinds of categorizing and reduction of people to types and data is also a serious matter, especially for classes of people — like returning citizens — who are seem largely as types and data. If you aren’t the right kind of type or data, you don’t even get an opportunity to go out in the world and become more than that. The more drone-line you are, however, they better things may work out for you. As I keep looking for “real” work, I’ll just have to keep an open my and close my own a little.
What’s even more whacked out is that on a certain well-know job advertising website, you can take all sort of assessments of abilities and skills. They tell me that I score off the charts in areas like marketing, supervisory skills, sales skills . . . and being a delivery driver. I should take this as an invitation to explore new career paths, although other sites tell me that, really, I should be an artist, writer, actor, editor or . . . college English professor. I suppose I could sell some cars, but I kinda think my resume would work against me even getting a foot in that door. Too old, overqualified, and too convicted. What’s a felon who pushes against type to do? Just beat on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly into a computer-categorized new world with such artificial intelligence in it.