Personality & Career Path

Everyone, particularly those on the brink of entering the work force or contemplating a serious career change, should be aware of how their personality fits with their career. Doing work that matches your own proclivities will not only ensure ongoing daily satisfaction with your job but also more likely lead to more substantial financial rewards. The web is full of free personality tests that can help match you with potential careers. Of the many personality tests out there, I find approaches based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to be the most coherent and applicable. This post notes the best way to figure out your MBTI personality type, why other tests aren’t quite as good, and other considerations worth noting for selecting your best career path.

• Using MBTI-Based Tests: I find the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to be highly accurate, though you have to be able to know when they are a bit off or when you yourself are going through a temporary personality phase. The test on similarminds.org spat out my personality type after a quick test, and mypersonality.info serves as an excellent centralizing site for quotes, snippets, and links to the best websites out there for describing MBTI personality types. It’s supposedly off base for 1 in 4 people, but when you read the descriptions you can figure out what the best fit is. You will also notice type placement to stick over the course of time: my approach to work has shifted somewhat over the course of ten years, but it’s clear the most consistent elements of my work mindset are at the core of my INTJ personality.* Once you have ascertained your personality type, check out MetaRasa.com to see how it aligns with your current job.
• Why not other tests? Other tests incorporate additional preferences and thus might be able to refine your list of recommended careers more than a MBTI-driven career test. For example, tests will try to determine whether you are driven by helping others or by personal gain or whether you prefer “creative” or “artistic” activities to more mundane ones. However, by introducing these additional variables (sometimes at the cost of other essential personality traits that MBTI covers), other personality tests increase the possibility that their predictions for you are off-base or too narrowly focused. It’s also tougher to self-correct for an erroneous test, since the tests don’t generally show the other possible outcomes of the test. I also find “helping others” and “artistic” elements to a job are easier to weave in and out of a career path than other aspects more fundamental to one’s personality. Finally, these parts of a career preference are most likely to directly contradict one another; for example, high design and social equity do not seem to go hand in hand in urban planning, so anyone hoping to appreciate both at once would be disappointed.
• Additional Considerations: Clearly, additional considerations must be taken in a career path other than personality fit. Salary, job growth, location, etc. are all important, but most careers suggested by personality type tests are possible to pursue in any metropolitan area, so these issues are subsidiary to the personality concerns.

I have learned from personal experience how important personality fit is to your career path. In my previous role as an Executive Director of a non-profit, the job started out as a multi-faceted, constantly varying role as we started up our organization; not surprisingly, “Organization Founder” is one of the recommended jobs for people like me. As the organization evolved, so did the role, and, as advocacy, networking, and interpersonal interactions moved to the center of the job, my interest concurrently shifted. Using the excellent resources on MetaRasa.com, I was able to see clearly how my job had come to diverge from my personality; the diagrams below show how different the two are:

Job Demands Diagram: Light areas show areas critical to success, focusing on extraverted feeling.

Personality Diagram: Light areas show areas of strength in personality, focusing here on introverted intuition.

In my next post, I will look at jobs that are particularly well-suited for INTJs like myself.

* Ten years ago, I originally tested as an INFJ, but realized INTJ was a better fit; I had just been going through a touchy-feely phase at the time of the test. Nowadays, I’m pretty entrenched on the “Thinking” side of the spectrum, but have moved closer to the “Sensing” side away from “iNtuition.”

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