Is Choosing Your Career A Game Of Chance?

The appliance of science – understanding personality and choosing a career

When we were very young, choosing a career seemed to be very straightforward. We just knew that we were destined to be a rock star, an astronaut, a sporting legend… whatever we wanted to be. Of course, by the time we get to choosing a job for real, most of us have had to rethink our original ideas. But when it comes to deciding on a career, what we do isn’t necessarily a great deal more scientific than our ideas from back in elementary school. 
 

Some people just go with whatever’s easiest, whatever seems to come along first. Others choose a job that brings in the big bucks, or at least has the potential to do so. Many individuals are influenced by what their friends or parents think, or by what people with their qualifications usually do, or by whatever is fashionable at the time. And if you end up in a job that makes you miserable, then you can always go through the same process a few years down the line – probably with no greater a guarantee of success.

The Importance of Personality

In choosing a career, it’s odd that many of us don’t really give a great deal of thought to what makes us unique, what makes us, well, us: our personality. We might think that this is less important than our abilities or qualifications, that we can fit in anywhere and enjoy and do well in a job that matches our skills, but this really isn’t the case. Our personality type has a big effect on how happy we are at work. Put simply, people with different personality preferences are happiest in different jobs.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) assessment, published by my company, is probably the most widely used personality questionnaire in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people have completed it over the last few years. As part of our ongoing research, most have also told us a little more about themselves, including:

•  The type of job they have
•  How satisfied they were with their job

We’ve been able to gather job satisfaction data on over 560,000 employed adults, covering 300 different occupations. We used this to create statistical models to predict how satisfied someone would be in each of these jobs, and similar roles, based on how they answered the MBTI assessment. Specifically, we can calculate the probability of someone being very satisfied, satisfied, somewhat satisfied, or dissatisfied in each occupation based on their personality preferences. The models are updated as more data comes in; new people are completing the MBTI assessment all the time. 

Using Personality Data in Career Choice

If your predicted satisfaction level for a job is higher than average, you are likely to find that occupation more satisfying than most people. Of course, job satisfaction isn’t everything, but higher levels of job satisfaction are related to greater well-being, engagement, organizational commitment, and job performance. In other words, it’s good for you and good for your organization. 

Also, looking at possible careers in terms of personality-job fit may throw up intriguing new possibilities that you hadn’t thought of before. Of course, ability, qualifications, training and so on are all still important, and a lack of these may make some careers unfeasible. But personality can be an excellent starting point for your career search, stripping away preconceptions and widening horizons. 

Understanding more about your personality is important in other ways, for example by helping job seekers adapt their natural communication style to create more persuasive job applications. And knowing your personality can help you leverage your strengths and avoid pitfalls when it comes to the job search process. 

Tools like the MBTI assessment often form the basis of development programs for individuals once they are in an organization. Maybe it’s time for people to use this knowledge to find the right job, and the right occupation, in the first place.

John Hackston is a chartered psychologist and Head of Thought Leadership at The Myers-Briggs Company where he leads the company’s Oxford-based research team. He is a frequent commentator on the effects of personality type on work and life, and has authored numerous studies, published papers in peer-reviewed journals, presented at conferences for organizations such as The British Association for Psychological Type, and has written on various type-related subjects in top outlets such as Harvard Business Review.  Connect John Hackston