Personality Type: The Secret to Your Satisfying Career
This lesson helps you understand what Personality Type is, and why it’s such an important tool in helping you find a satisfying career.
Where Career Satisfaction Comes From
Let’s start with this question: “What is the ideal job, anyway?”
The right job enhances your life. It is personally fulfilling because it nourishes the most important aspects of your personality. It suits the way you like to do things and reflects who you are. It lets you use your innate strengths in ways that come naturally to you, and it doesn’t force you to do things that you don’t do well (at least, not too often).
How can this course help? By introducing you to yourself. Using Personality Types will help you become more self-aware. Knowing who you are makes it easier to find out what you like to do. As you work your way through the online materials and the textbook, Do What You Are, you’ll learn what your Type is, as well as what makes you tick. Armed with this information, you can review job lists suited to your Type’s needs. Additionally, we’ll give you tips regarding job search strategies that’ll let the real you shine through. Questions? Comments? Visit the Message Board and express yourself.
How can you tell if you’re in the right job? Below are some general guidelines. If you’re not currently employed, keep them in mind as you search for your ideal job. If you are employed, see how your present job measures up.
If you’re in the right job, you should:
- Look forward to going to work (most of the time!)
- Feel energized by what you do
- Feel your contribution is respected and appreciated
- Feel proud when describing your work to others
- Enjoy and respect the people you work with
- Feel optimistic about your future
As general guidelines, these don’t apply equally to every person because career satisfaction is strongly linked to peoples’ motivations and needs. For example, if a person is highly motivated to accumulate wealth and power, than he or she will be happiest in a job that provides these things. Similarly, people whose primary motivation is to help others are happiest in jobs that allow them to do just that. More than any other tool, Type helps people tune into their own motivators — the first step in finding a satisfying job.
That said, let’s continue by actually examining the concept of Type.
Getting to Know Yourself
Let’s assume that you’re here because you want to discover your dream job. Be prepared to take a good look at yourself and accept what you find. Again, there are no good or bad Types. There are jobs that are more suitable for certain Types than others. You can read more about the concept of Type and how it works in the “Read This First” section of your textbook, Do What You Are.
What Is Personality Type?
Personality Type is a remarkable system for understanding people and why they do what they do. A few basics:
- There are 16 distinctly different personality Types, and everyone has one “true” Type that fits him or her best
- Each Type has its own natural strengths, potential weaknesses, innate predispositions, and tendencies
- All Types are equally valuable; there are no better or worse, healthier or sicker, smarter or dumber Types
- Although people of the same Type are similar in many ways, all people are unique individuals because they have different genes, parents, upbringings, etc.
- We’re all born with a Type that does not change throughout our life
- Personality Type is a developmental model; although our Types remain the same, we all grow and develop as a result of life experiences
- Type is not situational. People have a wide range of behaviors that allow us to act differently at, say, a ballgame or a funeral, but our behaviors — not our Types — change based on the situation
Next up, a brief look at the history of Type.
Do What You Like
Type doesn’t predict success. Nor does it determine intelligence. It does help us find out what motivates and energizes an individual. These elements are what you should look for in the work you choose to do. Essentially, the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most.
Read a bit more about the history of Type on pages 10-11 in Do What You Are.
Brief History and Uses of Personality Type
The popular use of Type is the result of the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and two American women, Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Jung, a psychoanalyst, believed that seemingly unpredictable and random behavior was actually quite predictable once a person’s underlying mental functions and attitudes were understood.
Katherine Briggs, long interested in the ways people were similar and different, was working on her “Typing” system when she began studying Jung’s work. Fortunately, she interested her then-young daughter, Isabel, in Type.
Isabel was an exceptionally gifted young woman who was so distraught by the terrible suffering in World War II that she resolved to try and do something that might help people understand each other, and perhaps avoid wars in the future.
To make a remarkable story quite short, Isabel and her mother began what was to become Isabel’s life work: making Jung’s insights into personality understandable and useful to the average person. Over a period of 40 years, Isabel clarified and expanded Jung’s work and developed a psychological assessment instrument identifying the sixteen different personality types that she named the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI(r)) instrument.
Today, the MBTI has been translated into dozens of languages and is used daily by a majority of the Fortune 500 companies. The Jung/Myers model of Personality Type is the most widely used personality assessment in the world, used in many settings, including business, education, and counselling.
Why do so many professionals rely on Type? Read on — that’s what we’ll cover in the next section.
How Personality Type Is Used
Throughout the world, Personality Type is used to help:
People find satisfying careers
Teams perform more effectively
Teachers reach their students
People better understand themselves, their spouses, and children
Managers motivate employees
Resolve unproductive conflicts
Marketers target their markets
Why Type Is More Helpful than Other Approaches
Traditionally, career counsellors help people identify their interests, skills, and values, believing that the more of these that are present in a job, the more satisfied the person will be. Although this approach makes a certain amount of sense, the truth is that all three of these change over time — especially in young people.
Most of us make important personal decisions early in life — usually in high school or college — before we’ve even had the kind of life experiences that allow us to know ourselves well. Because of this, the values, interests, and abilities we identify often change by the time we’re out in the work force. Consequently, a career that might have seemed like a good fit at age 20 is often not satisfying to the same person at age 35.
Think about yourself. How did you end up in your present career or job? Did you follow a careful, well-thought out plan based on a really good sense of who you are and what you need to be happy in a job? If so, you’re definitely in the minority! For most of us, the decision was made with considerably less insight and care. If you think about it, most people put more thought and time into researching the best car for them than they do the best career!
Today, as when I was growing up, parents — and in some cases teachers — hold the most influence over their children’s future career directions. Granted, in those days, more children were encouraged to pursue traditional routes: girls were steered toward nursing and teaching, boys toward business and engineering. Frequently, children were expected to enter their family business, with little thought about whether or not they were suited to it.
Kids who liked to argue were often encouraged to be lawyers. Many graduated from law school without realizing that only a very small percentage of lawyers ever enter a courtroom (and therefore make a living arguing!). A number of my friends were told, from a very early age, that they would become doctors. As a result of having this message positively reinforced — almost on a daily basis over several years — a lot of them ended up in medicine. And while some have had satisfying careers, many others have not. Why? They were never really suited to medicine in the first place — they only thought they were.
Fortunately for today’s job seekers, much has changed. There has been a gradual and steady shift towards the belief that it’s important for people to enjoy their work. And when they do, they’re not only happier and healthier, but they also do a better job for their employers. Because identifying one’s values, interests, and abilities does not predict career satisfaction or success, career professionals have discovered new tools to help them help their clients. And one of the best is Personality Type.
Personality Type is such an important variable and useful career predictor because it remains constant throughout a person’s life. It helps people understand who they are — the innate way each of us naturally sees the world and likes to make decisions. Although all individuals are unique, people of the same type often share enormous similarities in the kinds of work activities they find satisfying.
While Personality Type is not the only piece of the puzzle, in the last ten to fifteen years, career professionals around the world have recognized Type as a very important piece — one that can help people make the best and most satisfying career decisions.
Moving Forward
We’ve defined what an ideal job is. We’ve also discussed what a Personality Type is, and why it’s a significant factor in determining career satisfaction. In Lesson 2, we’ll look at the Personality Type model and ascertain which of the 16 Types you are.
Assignment: Personality Type: The Secret to Your Satisfying Career
Assignments are designed to give you the chance to do further reading in the course text and to practice applying the knowledge learned in activities and class discussions.
Review and respond to the following questions:
- Think back to when you were a child or adolescent. Ask yourself how similar you are now, as an adult, to how you were then. Sure, you’re taller, wiser, better coordinated, etc., now, but focus on your nature — your basic personality.For example, were you a cautious, sensitive, sympathetic child? Or were you more of an adventurous, tough-skinned, thrill seeker? Of course, these are just extreme examples, and not the only choices. See if you can determine ways that your basic nature has not changed that much.
- If you can’t remember how you were, ask a parent, aunt or uncle, or friend who has known you as a child and an adult for their opinion.
- If you are a parent and have more than one child, think about your children. Are they similar or different? Did you notice major personality differences right from the start? If possible, check out your observations with your spouse.
- If you don’t have children, think about a sibling or a friend you’ve known since childhood. Is he or she basically “the same person” you knew back then?
TIP
If you have further questions about Personality Type, go to www.Personalitytype.com and click on the FAQ tab for frequently asked questions.
