Astrological career analysis: what you make of it

A career analysis arrives as a text: a few pages about dispositions, inclinations and fields of work. Whether anything comes of it is decided less by the text than by the question you went in with – and by what you do with it in the weeks that follow.

Three very different occasions

Most people have one worked out in one of three situations, and each of them needs something different.

Before the first decision, at eighteen or nineteen: this is about direction, not about fine detail. Anything that narrows the field is useful – whether the inclination runs to ordering, to inventing or to caring for others.

In the middle of it, at around thirty-five, in a profession that works and still feels empty: here no direction helps any more, only a distinction does. Is it the work, the job or the people? Those are three findings with three completely different consequences, and only one of them is called a change of profession.

After a break you did not choose: here a text of this kind is above all a way of widening the view at a moment when worry is narrowing it.

Profession, calling, livelihood

Three words that get muddled in everyday use. A livelihood pays the rent. A profession is what it says on the payslip. A calling is what you give your Sunday afternoons to without noticing.

An astrological text describes the third of these above all: an inclination, a what-for. It says nothing about whether it can be made to pay. A great many disappointments begin at exactly this point – a description of a gift is read as a promise of a career.

How to read the text without fooling yourself

Read it twice, two weeks apart. The first time you nod at everything that flatters; everyone does that, and it means nothing. The second time, pay attention to the sentences that annoyed you. Annoyance is a better signal than agreement.

Mark only what brings a scene from your own life to mind straight away – a situation, a project, an argument. A sentence without a scene is decoration. If three or four marks are left at the end, you have something in your hands.

And then pass on the question rather than the text: ask two people who have known you a long time what, as far as they can see, you lose yourself in. Where their answer and your own marks meet lies the most interesting point in the whole process.

What comes next is not a resignation

The most common mistake is to draw a big decision out of a text. A text can support a hunch; it cannot test one. Testing happens only through contact with the matter itself: a day spent shadowing someone, an evening class, a weekend in the workshop of someone who does it daily. Three such attempts say more about your aptitude than the best text you can read on the subject.

Set yourself a deadline for it. An analysis still lying in a drawer after four weeks has missed its purpose, and that holds however well it was written.

Where the limit lies

A career analysis is not an aptitude test. It measures nothing, it forecasts no salary, it does not know the job market and knows nothing about entry requirements, length of training or the state of things in your region. That is what careers advice, professional bodies and work placements are for – and none of it is replaced by a horoscope.

What remains is not little for all that: a language for a dissatisfaction you have so far only felt, and permission to take seriously an inclination you have been talking yourself out of for years. If a text does that, it has done enough. The planets show what interpretation actually works with; the horoscopes give an overview of the individual analyses.