Adult Vocational Guidance

SPECIALIZATION is the keynote of present-day vocations.

For greater efficiency, man has subdivided even the physical labor of roadbuilding or automobile manufacture into many processes with special machinery and special operators assigned to each.

As for the sciences and humanities, our fund of knowledge is adding to itself such detail that one man is expected to master only a small fraction of the tremendous whole.

Physicians have divided the body into tens of little bits. Doctors are:

• ear specialists
• eye specialists
• abdominal surgeons
• dermatologists.

The general practitioner is almost extinct.

Whereas the ancients produced men who could speak authoritatively about:

• the movements of astral bodies,
• the earth,
• the mental processes of man,
• the conventions of art, literature
• drama

Today, a man does well to become expert in but a single branch of one science.

You have:

• electro-physicists
• physicists who deal only in the dynamics of wave mechanics
• physicists who spend their lives studying radioactivity.

Each devotes years to training for his profession.

Theoretically, a mistaken choice is correctable. But it is often practically so.

Men who might have been great statesmen are forced by their families or by some mistaken boyhood sentimentality to study and become unhappy and unsuccessful surgeons.

Women who might compete with men in adventurous activities are condemned because of family pressure to lives in quiet, “womanly” occupations.

I do not want to take too unreal an attitude about our ability to pick and choose our life’s work.

I fully realize that poverty and lack of education, the necessity to go to work very young and all such very real circumstances interfere with our freedom to become all we are capable of being.

A person planning his future will need to consider the trends in modern industry and professions and not choose a certain type of work which has been superseded by newer methods.

He will have to figure on the labor market, the supply of trained persons in relation to the abundance or scarcity of jobs in a particular field.

Yet, to the extent that self-knowledge will help in adjusting people to conditions as they exist or in changing those conditions, to that extent hand analysis will be a real aid in vocational guidance.

Let us classify the vocations. There are certain occupations which require method, order and precision above all else.

Accounting, bookkeeping, office management, various kinds of clerking, laboratory work in chemistry or physics, secondary research, the keeping of records, historical, geological, ethnological research, administration, the law in its less spectacular aspects, even the adventurous callings like soldiering and navigation require discipline and order.

For patience and method, look for long, straight fingers.

If they have square tips, expect practicality in addition, and a little imagination.

Long, squaretipped are ideal bookkeeper or record clerk.

Long, tapering fingers, provided that the thumb is strong enough, and the mount Jupiter prominent enough to give leadership, might be excellent for a government administrative officer.

The length of his fingers would give him the patience and methodical approach necessary for dealing with endless details. The tapering fingers would give sufficient sensitiveness and intuition to facilitate his dealings with others, to help him gauge the public temper.

A strong thumb and firm hand would give him energy and determination, lack of which is the most outstanding fault of long, tapering fingers.

The Mount of Jupiter would add qualities of leadership and ambition.

For statesmanship, as contrasted with efficient government clerking, a wide palm should provide the breadth of outlook and energy of the spatulate shape, and the line of head should be of good quality, preferably straight and well-balanced.

Short fingers are usually associated with a larger, more comprehensive point of view than is permitted by the long-fingered preoccupation with details.

The short-fingered occupations are:

• financiers
• investment bankers
• bridge builders (though not the draftsmen and subordinate architects and engineers who figure stresses and compute the arches and suspensions)
• promoters
• publicists
• theatrical entrepeneurs
• advertising experts
• traders
• adventurers
• aviators, and so on.

Short-fingered, vigorous hands, in which the mental aspects are little developed usually belong to those who work at out-door occupations calling for considerable physical energy.

The hand of great dexterity will usually be neither exceptionally short- nor long-fingered.

Skilled mechanics, surgeons, operators of precision machines, cabinet makers, manicurists, watchmakers, embroiderers, barbers, sculptors, pianists, typesetters, these will generally have fingers of moderate length, and the other indications of show how the manual dexterity can be put to use.

and prominent base on the thumb often the accurate touch so necessary to the surgeon, dentist and the hand will

A long, thin second phalanx indicate skilled mechanic.