It can become quite confusing differentiating between physical, occupational and recreational therapists and recreational workers and so on. This group, the recreational therapists, are the people who use recreation (games, dance, sports, drama) as a method of helping people to recover from illness or injury, or from some chronic or even genetic conditions. For example, something we talk about a lot here, the use of role playing games to overcome some aspects of the autism spectrum would be done by recreational therapists. Similarly, while the teaching of emotional intelligence to children might be done by regular teachers, if the problems came as a result of injury or disease, it would be these therapists who ran the program.

The usual training is via a college degree in therapeutic recreation and that college degree is usually a Bachelor’s. It is possible to take an Associate’s college degree and this will qualify you for paraprofessional jobs, or even higher degrees which would be useful in senior management or research. The BLS tells us quite clearly that you will need to have reserves of empathy for this job. You’ll be working with people are ill, sometimes severely so. For example, one growing area of the work is in helping older people recover from the mishaps that accompany age, using drama to help stroke victims recover their speech, or dance for their movement.

Given that requirement for empathy I think we can see clearly where you should be in the results of our EQSQ personality tests: very much a career for those with the female brain type.