Briggs Meyer

¶ … personality type can affect my effectiveness on the job, at least in certain situations. At the heart of this understanding is that each job has its own set of expectations, and there are certain traits that are strongly geared towards the achievement of those expectations. Some situations call for specific ways of thinking, and handling things, and no one manager is going to excel at all of them.

Some people will have a high level of emotional competence -- they might fall into the feeling part of the Jungian typology -- and this works great when that skills is needed, but it isn't effective when clear, unemotional thinking is required. With respect to career, the Jungian typologies make note that certain people are oriented towards certain careers, and there is strong inherent logic in that. For example, some jobs require a high level of interaction between people.

Extroverts are going to be better at those jobs because they gain energy from interaction with others. Introverts lose energy from interpersonal interaction, and as a result are going to be less effective at jobs that require a lot of interpersonal interaction. I have seen this myself, with respect to sales jobs. Part of sales is having good sales technique, but part of it is just being able to deal well with people.

Extroverts tend to be better, not because they are always natural sales people, but because they enjoy dealing with other people. Introverts, even ones with exceptional sales skills, tend not to make great salespeople in the long run because they struggle with the high level of interpersonal interaction that the position requires. The great sales skills are effectively wasted in most introverts, while an extrovert can succeed at a sales position even with limited natural salesmanship. The reverse can be said with respect to analytical positions.

A financial analyst, for example, needs to have a high level of thinking skills. They cannot use emotion, because the job entail spending hours doing cold analytical work to uncover truths locked in financial data. This is not the work for the emotional person -- there is no benefit to having emotion in this job, but there is benefit to being able to think through the patterns and chains of events that result in the insights to be gained from financial analysis.

So there is no question that the optimal career choice for somebody should reflect their personality type. There are just certain careers that appeal to certain people. There are other facets of personality that can affect one's career arc, not just the Jungian ones. For example, if somebody has a strong musical inclination, they are far more likely to thrive as a musician, or in theater, because those things will come naturally to them. Somebody with no such inclination is well-advised to stick to other fields.

People have different levels of creativity -- someone who can write well but has no creativity might make a good technical writer, but a lousy novelist. The reverse is also true -- creative people probably cannot handle the inherent dryness of technical writing. My own Jungian test put me as an INTJ. This designation carries with it specific ramifications for my career. Apparently I am oriented towards scientific careers such as engineering, computer programming, law or management. This is interesting, because I think that management can go both ways.

There are managers who mostly deal with people directly, and other managers who deal mainly with systems and other abstractions. So as far as this goes, there is definitely some open-endedness but the quiz seems to definitely guide me in certain specific jobs that share a similar way of thinking. This is actually somewhat demotivating, if anything. It's like this. These tests aren't about skills, but personality traits.

Now, in a test of skills I could learn that I am not very good at Chinese, but maybe I want to be. That's okay. I can learn Chinese if I need to. But learning how to have a different personality type is another matter altogether. This test describes traits of people in absolutes, especially the traits that are dominant or strong. There is no real indication that the authors of this personality quiz believe people can change their personality or make improvements.

So for me, there seems little motivation to try to change things, because they appear to be written in stone. That is the impression I get from this test. What it does make me question is more the career path that I envision for myself. Naturally, a career will probably be stronger if I am able to follow a career path that is well-suited to my interests and to my.