Find out your personality type and choose the right career

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself.  Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.” – Bruce Lee

Our personality is made up of a combination of characteristics or qualities that make us who we are. These characteristics control our emotions, thoughts, feelings, actions, attitude and behaviour and personality theorists refer to them as personality traits.  It’s these traits that make us interesting and unique and they remain mostly consistent throughout our lives.

Research has shown that different personality types tend to have distinct preferences in their choice of careers. In this article you can check out your personality type and use the information to steer your career direction. Good luck!

What your personality means for your career

The greater your self-awareness the more likely it is that you will make better career and life choices and feel more content because you will be living your life authentically. This is why it is important to learn more about your personality and come to a better understanding of your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses.

Self-assessment tools can be useful in helping you to develop your self-awareness and can play a great role in helping you to make important decisions about your next career move.

What is your personality type?

Understanding your personality type can be determined by engaging in a scientific approach using online self-assessments or having a psychologist analyse you. If you choose either of these options you will find that the personality assessment is quite straightforward – you simply answer a series of questions about your likes, dislikes and aspirations. At the end of the assessment you receive a report detailing your personality type.

Another way of determining your personality type is to just take a long and deep look at yourself. Asking questions is a great way of discovering who you are and what you are. The questions you asked yourself in the previous workouts along with the forthcoming workouts will assist you in discovering more about your personality.

Useful resource: You can check out this online personality profiling assessment to gauge your personality type: http://www.personalitypage.com

Play to your strengths

“My best friend is the one that brings out the best in me.” – Henry Ford

Work is much more enjoyable when you’re doing something you enjoy and you’re good at, so take some time to think about your key strengths, skills, experiences, knowledge and interests.

Here are some questions to ponder and jot down your answers…

Tip: Your response to some of these questions may appear to be the same and that’s perfectly ok. Go with the flow, get your creative juices working and see where it takes you and if any themes appear.

Capture your strength

• What are my strengths in and outside of work?

• What do I really enjoy doing?

• What are my favourite skills?

• What do I do best? What am I good at?

• What are 3-6 of my strongest skills or competencies?

• What have been my greatest personal and work achievements?

• What do other people say I’m good at?

• What awards and certificates have I received?

• What have I been recognised for inside and outside of work?

• What type of activity or environment attracts me?

In a next step, you can take a look at your answers and make a list of any skills, interests, attributes that keep cropping up and stand out.

Now consider if your list of strengths can be clustered into themes and make notes.

You may have strengths that you recognise in yourself or others recognise in you but this doesn’t necessarily mean you want to use those strengths in your next career move.

So, now is the time to review your answers and make a note of those strengths you would like to make use of in your next role.

Tip: this is about you so be honest and don’t be influenced by other people who think you should do something because you are good at it.

Useful resource: On http://www.strengthsfinder.com you can find a self-assessment that helps to uncover your top 5 strengths.  Information on careers which may suit each of your 5 strengths is provided along with ideas for action.

If you are looking for further career advice, then “4 Steps to Career Success” written by Michaela Partridge is the right choice for you.