How well your personality and career match can significantly influence whether you find that career fulfilling, stressful, boring or challenging. That's why many people seek a career that closely matches their personality preferences.
Does your current job suit you?
We have a new online system that enables you to compare your current job with your preferences and see how well they match. To use this system:
- Complete our MMDI questionnaire ('Mental Muscle Diagram Indicator') to find out your personality preferences. Make a note of the mmdi code.
- Complete our JDQ (Job Demands Questionnaire) to find out what aspects of your personality you need to use in your role to be successful. At the bottom of the questionnaire, enter your MMDI code.
- 'Submit' the data and you will be shown three 'personality radar' reports showing (a) the demands of your job, (b) your personality preferences and (c) the important areas of difference between the two (highlighted in red)
This is a new system that is in development. So, when you have finished, send us some feedback or suggestions for improvement.
Personality and Careers
Look at careers for:
| ISTJ | ISFJ | INFJ | INTJ |
| ISTP | ISFP | INFP | INTP |
| ESTP | ESFP | ENFP | ENTP |
| ESTJ | ESFJ | ENFJ | ENTJ |
If you want help working out your personality type, then complete our MMDI online questionnaire. Also we have another article containing more general (non-personality-based) career choice information.
However, you should also consider careers that have some degree of "stretch", because you may find it rewarding to be challenged and developed. If you are confident that your core personality needs can be met, being stretched and developing greater flexibility can reap long term rewards not only in career development but also in preparing you for later life and developing you as a more rounded person.
Stretch
It is worth considering careers that aren't a direct match for your personality preferences, because:
- you can provide a different type of contribution to others in the same field
- you find the challenge of being 'stretched' outside your preferences rewarding
- doing a job that closely suits your preferences may not provide enough personal development for you
- working outside your preferences may encourage greater creativity from you
- teams often perform better with a mix of people/perspectives, and you may be able to fill a niche that others do not fill
Also, it is possible to be stretched 'within your preferences' or 'across preferences'. For example:
- someone with Sensing preferences likes to achieve clear goals
- therefore, if you prefer Sensing, to be stretched 'within your preferences' is to be given more difficult goals that require you to work harder to achieve them
- to be stretched 'across preferences', however, is to be given a responsibility with:
- unknown outcomes, pursuing possibilities yet to be discovered;
- a vague brief, eg: "the job is what you make of it"
- new, untried responsibilities using unknown or unproven techniques
If you decide that you want to be 'stretched' in your job/career, you need to decide whether you want to be stretched within your preferences or across preferences.
Career Data
At the bottom of this page there is a table containing links to job lists for each personality type. The example occupations listed for each type are derived from research we undertook in the late 1990s that examined which mental functions are used in particular occupations.
Most career research, that relates personality types to jobs, looks at what jobs people find themselves in. There are a couple of potential criticisms of this approach:
- Although a career may be attractive to particular personality types, and therefore have a high proportion of those types represented in it, the reality of it may be different and appeal to different preferences
- Being in a career doesn't necessarily mean that you find it fulfilling.
A counter to these criticisms is that one can make the assumption that if a type finds a career that is fulfilling then they are more likely to stay in it. Therefore, jobs with high representations of a certain type are likely to be ones that suit their preferences.
MTR-i team-role-based research
Our research takes a slightly different approach. Rather than correlating the types of people to jobs, we have examined which mental functions are used in various jobs and then related those to personality types. That is, in the tables (on each personality type page) we have listed the occupations associated with the dominant and auxiliary functions of each type.
Some jobs appear in many lists. This is because they have a high flexibility factor, require the use of a wide variety of mental functions, so match many personality types. Other jobs appear in a few lists, because they make use of just a few mental functions. Flexibility is related to stretch, and one of the things to take into account when choosing a career.
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The approach we have taken in our research isn't necessarily any better than the conventional approach, but it provides a different perspective. As with most research the results need to be treated with some caution, because this research did not specifically look at the question of fulfilment or stretch. To go to the page for a particular personality type, click on a type code in the table (right). |
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