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The secret to a successful career is simple. Find a job that suits your natural abilities and working style.
But this is easier said than done. To identify what environments and types of work are best suited for you, you need to have a solid understanding of who you are—a deep sense of self-awareness.
Enter human design.
In this article, we’ll review:
- The basics of human design
- How to leverage human design for a career in tech
- Career paths to consider based on your energy type
- How General Assembly can help
Human Design, Explained
In short, human design is a tool for understanding how you make decisions, your unique strengths, and your purpose.
The concept was created by Ra Uru Hu, born Alan Robert Krakower, in the late 1980s. Ra details the discovery of human design in a book called Rave I’Ching. Like astrology, human design takes into account your birth date, time, and location.
Human design uses this information to identify your dominant chakras and create a personal body graph. The body graph shows you how your energy is designed. While it looks complex at first, there are a few foundational pieces of information to focus on. The first thing to understand about your chart is your energy type.
What’s your energy type?
There are five distinct energy types that could apply to you. Your energy type tells you how you’re meant to interact with the energies around you. This is important because when you embrace your energy type, it’s easier to navigate the world. When you resist it, you may feel stuck or frustrated. Every energy also has a default strategy.
The five energy types include:
- Manifestor
Making up only about 9% of the population, Manifestors have a powerful aura that impacts the people around them. They take initiative and thrive off creating new ideas, movements and innovations.
Strategy: Informing people of their decisions before they make them
- Generator
Generators are the most common energy type, representing about 70% of the population. This energy type needs to do work they love and feel energized by. Unlike Manifestors, they’re not initiators. Instead, they respond to opportunities and make decisions based on their gut feelings.
Strategy: Responding with intuition
- Manifesting-Generator
As you might have guessed from the name, Manifesting-Generators are a hybrid. They take traits from both energy types. They’re multi-faceted individuals with diverse interests and talents. Like Manifestors, they can initiate and take action. They also share similarities with Generators in terms of their sustainable work energy. Their productivity and motivations are different every day, which makes them well-suited for a life with lots of variety.
Strategy: Respond, then inform
- Projector
Projectors are energized by those around them and don’t hold a lot of energy on their own. They also take on the role of advisors or guides. They can recognize the talents and potential of those around them. But they wait for the invitation before sharing their wisdom and guidance.
Strategy: Wait for the invitation
- Reflector
This energy type is very rare, and only about 1% of people fall under the Reflector category. Reflectors are very sensitive to their environments and reflect that energy. They also can see and evaluate situations from many perspectives. It’s recommended they take their time making big decisions. 28 days to be exact —in line with the lunar cycle.
Strategy: Wait for the lunar cycle
Using human design to understand how you interact best with the world is a great starting point for assessing your career. Fill out this human design test to understand what energy profile applies to you.
Leveraging Human Design For a Career in Tech
Every job requires a different set of strengths and skills. To improve your career, it’s helpful to understand how you operate most effectively. When you’re able to embrace your strengths and who you are, success follows easier.
Human design can help you on your professional journey in tech in several ways, including navigating career transitions and improving collaboration.
Navigating Career Transitions
Baby Boomers switched jobs an average of 12.4 times over their careers. This number is increasing as job hopping becomes more common for millennials and Gen Z.
This is all to say — career transitions are a natural part of life. Whether it’s a transition to a new role, new industry or completely new path, they can be a challenging time of unknowns.
Navigating these unknowns can be broken down into two distinct stages. First and foremost is internal research. Take stock of who you are, what energizes you, what motivates you, and how you work best.
The second is finding a career that complements those innate qualities.
Tools like human design and personality tests are helpful approaches for the former. Human design gives you a jumping-off ground to understand what you need to succeed.
Improving how you collaborate
Identifying how you work best with others is another benefit of human design. To do so, you first need to understand your own working preferences.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a Projector and interested in design. Explore which types of design roles collaborate with others more than working autonomously. If you naturally get energy from others, it doesn’t make sense to work in a role that’s mostly solo. Rather, embrace your instincts to find job compatibility.
Which Tech Career is Right For Me? (Based on Human Design)
So you’ve taken the human design quiz and know your energy type. Now the real question is how to know what you want to do for a career.
While human design won’t give you any definitive answers, it can act as a guide. There are so many paths you can take in tech. Knowing your energetic makeup can help leverage your strengths and habits. That way, you can find a role that’s aligned with your natural abilities and tendencies.
What are career paths that work with different energy types? Here are a few pairings in tech to consider:
Product management for Manifestors: Product managers are responsible for initiating projects. They need to be able to set goals and drive the development of new products and features. Plus, this role requires regular decision-making — including prioritizing work and managing resources. Given the natural leadership capabilities of Manifestors, they’re often well-suited for product management.
Software engineering for Generators: Software engineers need to solve complex problems. They also need to be detail-oriented in their approach. This is a great fit for Generators who have sustainable energy levels — especially when working on projects that excite them.
Digital marketing for Manifesting-Generators: In digital marketing, no two days are the same. Manifesting-Generators thrive in a dynamic environment. This makes them well-suited to juggle the various tasks required in digital marketing — from social media to email to SEO and beyond.
Data analysis for Projectors: Data analytics isn’t only about analyzing numbers. It’s essential to be able to translate those numbers into strategic insights. Projectors are known for their ability to see the big picture and offer guidance. Their advisory nature can be highly valuable in translating data into actionable strategies.
UX Design for Reflectors: With their rare sensitivity to environments and multifaceted perspective, Reflectors make exceptional UX designers. Their ability to deeply evaluate situations aligns with the iterative nature of UX design, while their deliberate decision-making, ensures a more empathetic, user-centric, and thoroughly refined end product.
Keep in mind: human design is only one aspect to consider as you assess your career options. Also, take into account your unique interests, experiences, skills, and desires for the future.
Designing Your Tech Career with General Assembly
Understanding human design is a logical first step for those aspiring to make a career change. But where do you go from there?
You’ve assessed your inner self. Now it’s time to start looking outwards and put your strengths into action.
One way to do this is through continued education.
General Assembly offers a holistic approach to education for a range of tech careers. Our instructors are experts in the field, with experience at some of the top tech companies in the world. They bring real-world insights and learnings into the classroom.
But more than that, we don’t take a standardized approach to education. No two people learn the same way. And no two days look the same in a tech career. Learning needs to be ever-evolving to align with both individuals’ changing needs and the fast-paced tech industry. At General Assembly, we offer a range of courses to fit different learning styles and circumstances. This includes part-time learning, immersive courses, on-demand learning, and more. In all these courses, you’ll be working on projects that are hands-on and relevant to your industry.
Equipped with a deeper awareness of yourself through human design and the options to improve your skills, you’ll be well on your way to finding a fulfilling career path. So stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Instead, find a square hole.
Ready to unlock your unique potential? Contact us to receive tailored advice.