The Best Jobs for Autodidacts
The Best Jobs for Autodidacts
The habit of self-tuition prepares people for word-intensive lines of work
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In the 1700s, a young man with a taste for self-tuition might apprentice himself to a printer. While he enjoyed no inherent advantage over his colleagues when it came to the handling of ink balls, the “pulling of the devil’s tail,” or the placement of type into the upper and lower cases, he would serve his master well when it came to catching mistakes of spelling, grammar, and, at a times, style. (My father, who learned to write as a cub reporter in the 1930s, often spoke well of the literary advice offered by the printers at his newspaper.)
Today, autodidacts continue to gravitate towards lines of work in which people fond of reading, listening, and language enjoy advantages over their less literate contemporaries. Medical coding, for example, is largely a matter of translating the medical jargon into the languages spoken by the paymasters at insurance companies and government agencies. Thus, someone who can figure out that pericarditis has something to do with inflammation (itis) of the outside (peri) of the heart (cardia), has an advantage over a person less familiar with formal language or the history of words. Similarly, computer programing favors folk who realize, from the beginning, that the same word (or string of words) can mean very different things.
Folks fond of self-tuition also enjoy the advantage of knowing how to prepare themselves for word-intensive trades. For one thing, they understand the value of preliminary research, of learning some of the peculiarities of the profession in question before jumping in with both feet. For another, they are already aware that, given the quality of many, if not most, of the courses that promise to teach vocational skills, they are better off learning on their own.
For Deeper Delving: If I Was Starting Over in Medical Coding, by Victoria Moll, deals explicitly with (you guessed it) medical coding. However, the approaches to training that she discusses also offer much of value to autodidacts you might be interested in other lines of work. (The best part of the video begins at the three minute mark.)