What is the best career path for your personality trait?

Find the best career path for your personality trait

As individuals and professionals, we are all unique. This is what makes up a vibrant and diverse workforce.

We have all heard the famous sentiment:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Simplistic as it may sound, it is a valuable guide when selecting which career path to embark on.

For most of us, work will go through peaks and troughs regardless of whether we love our career path. Work will always have challenges. There will always be times when we need to go that extra mile, reaching deeply within ourselves to respond with the grit required to achieve an outcome. This is what makes us grow, both personally and professionally.

Being passionate about your career is what helps us to push through these times. To have passion, we need to feel purpose. To feel purpose, it helps to love what we do.

Do you get excited by detail and find yourself compelled to spend time being left alone to tweak with codes? Perhaps you’ve always been a natural organiser and the satisfaction that comes from achieving a project? Does your empathetic nature often lead you to be the nurturer? Or, does capturing and holding the attention of an entire room gets your adrenaline pumping?

We are all different.

Our personality plays a major role in influencing our behaviours, learning style and thought processes. In fact, it affects many of our fundamental career decisions, naturally gravitating us towards the careers that fit our preferences.

Personality traits certainly play a part in helping us determine the ‘fit’ when placing a candidate. Not just about the fit of the person to the role, but importantly, how this person would fit into the team, the wider organisation and workplace culture. There’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ personality traits – it’s about being able to understand each type and appreciate the differences. – Gabby Alldis, Recruitment Consultant (M&T Resources)

As such, it’s important to understand what our personality type is.

What are the different personality types?

Truity Psychometrics has helpfully developed an infographic that details the four major dimensions of personality types initially described by Carl Jung and career suggestions that fit those personalities.

If you don’t know your personality type yet, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test would be a good place to start. Created in 1944, it is a psychoanalytical questionnaire that sorts a person’s thinking preferences across those four dimensions, resulting in 16 distinctive personality types.

• Extraversion (E) vs Introversion (I): Preference in terms of focusing on the outer world or on inner world.
• Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N): Preference to focus on the basic information you take in or to interpret and add meaning.
• Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F): When making decisions, preference to look at logic and consistency or look at the people and special circumstances.
• Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P): In dealing with the outside world, preference to get things decided or to stay open to new information / options.

Assessing your personality type

Based on the personality groups and dimensions listed above, the infographic below outlines the four major groups and examples of career paths that might suit each personality type.

Do you think your personality has affected your career path?