Snapshot Question: The Many Meanings Of Best

[silveradept]

Two-parter for those wishing to answer. Please provide reasoning and detail to your heart's content.

a) If a question asks you what kind of work best uses your skills, what does that mean to you? Please answer this question completely before proceeding to the next one, so that your answer is not tainted. Write it in the comment box or something.

b) If a question asks you what kind of work best uses your skills, can/does it mean what kind of work most uses your skills? If yes, should it? If no, why not?

Context will follow after some amount of responses are collected and when I can get to a keyboard...

Comments

a)

[azurelunatic]

This job will consume me. I will also enjoy the fuck out of it, unless it goes badly wrong. I will be engrossed in my job while I am working on it, and it may follow me home. I'll spend my time there thinking about work, and applying my creativity to the fun problems it serves to me.

If I have idle moments, I expect my brain to be chugging away on things that I may not have realized I was thinking about until something happens and I see the answer.

b)

[azurelunatic]

Not necessarily. I may have untapped skill sets in a job that fits me enough to gain my full engagement, and a job that on a regular basis uses skills I have but don't enjoy using, I'll never be able to fully engage with, because it'll hurt.

"Most uses" can and will lead to burnout, while "best" has enough breathing room to allow me to stretch and remain myself.

Re: a) and b)

[silveradept]

Thanks for your input. The difference between the two seemed pretty apparent to me at the time.

[redsixwing]

A) It's not only something I can do well, but something I can enjoy. If I am bored, the job may request my skills to their fullest, but it's not likely to get them.

In my case, it must be something that will constantly challenge and teach me, and it requires a fair amount of ingenuity and problem-solving to get the job done.

B) Not... necessarily. I have a lot of skills that don't mesh particularly well, so something that uses all of them would be pretty unusual.

[silveradept]

Thanks for your help. I wanted to be sure the language hadn't changed on me while I wasn't looking.

[shenalia]

A) I can best answer that by restating the question in different terms: "What kind of work are your set of skills best suited for?" (As I've had this question pop up regarding my complaints of being retrained in the military...)

B) It could? I think of it more along the lines of, every person has a -set- of skills, and most jobs use one or two of those skills... but not the whole set. If a person can find a job that uses the -entirety- of their skill set and doesn't require more than that skill set contains - except, perhaps, skills that one can easily develop out of the ones they already have... that would probably be the "best use", IMO.

[silveradept]

That is a better way of phrasing it, certainly. Wish I could have had that before when we were talking about it initially.

[cbpotts.livejournal.com]

I always took that phrasing to mean "what can I do that no one else can do as well as I can" (given the pool of people available, not all of humanity) For example, in a volunteer group I belong to, the best use of my skills can be grant writing, even though I can do other things, and other people in the group certainly have the capability to do the grant writing, no one can do it as well as I can, and I can do other things in the group but not nearly as well as other people can do them. (For example I can drive the big brush truck, but I don't do so with the sort of reckless elan one needs to get to an accident scene very very quickly)

I'm not sure I understand the second question wholly - grant writing, for example, is not a taxing endeavor for me - I don't feel like I'm pushing myself or using every bit of my knowledge to do an acceptable job, but sometimes the experience of using skill becomes a place where you don't experience it as effort BECAUSE you're skilled, if that makes sense?

Hope this is helpful.

[silveradept]

That's quiet helpful, thank you.

[emsporter.livejournal.com]

The kind of work that BEST uses my skills? Would be work that my skillset is tailor-made to fit. Like a key in a lock. I've no idea what that role would be for me personally; my skillset is a bit ... diverse... at the best of times, and I still haven't worked out What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.
That would mean a job that I'm utterly competent and capable of all the time. The problem with that idea is that it doesn't leave much room for expansion; either of my skillset, or within the employer. if you're indispensable in your position, you can't be promoted.

The kind of work that BEST uses my skills is unlikely to be the kind that MOST uses my skills. There are a LOT of jobs out there that people mostly-fit. What the employer needs is skillset ABC, and you have aBCd - so you do your best on requirement A with skill a, you rock at B and C, and you find things that scratch the itch to use skill d outside of work.
Depending on what skill d is, the workplace may get surprise advantages from it; gradually meaning that the role fits you better over time than it did when you started out. You may also find that the experience of stretching yourself makes you better at A.

There's another way to look at this one, too; you might have an epic skillset in, oh, event management; but the roles that are most available are actually secretarial/organising/office management, so you use MOST of your skillset in the only employment available, rather than the job you're 'best fit' for.


Hmmm. I think on balance that I don't want a job that's the perfect fit; I want one that leaves me room to grow. But perhaps "room to grow" is "best use of my skillset". Hmmm.

[silveradept]

Thanks for the input. Best and most were two different things, definitely.