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Career Planning - Step 1: Part A - What I Learned

Aligning Personality with Career Opportunities

Part A - Personality Preferences

Step I is all about aligning who you are with what you love to do in a way that offers both personal satisfaction and financial independence.

In this first phase of Step I, you will take advantage of a well-established tool that correlates personality preferences with career opportunities and is available at no charge via the Web from Humanmetrics.com. It is called the Jung Typology Test™ and was developed using behavioral theories by Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, and personality inventory techniques developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, an American psychological theorist.

How it works is that you will be introduced to seventy-two brief questions that offer either a "yes" or a "no" response. Based on your choice, you will be presented with one of four different sets of personality preference profiles that correlate to different career preferences. These four personality preferences include E or I, S or N, T or F and J or P. Each letter refers to a particular behavioral tendency that describes different personalities including:

Set 1:
E = Extrovert
I = Introvert
Set 2:
S = Sensing
N = intuitive
Set 3:
T = Thinking
F = Feeling
Set 4:
J = Judging
P = Perceiving


Each of the four sets of personality preferences identified introduces two different extremes regarding how people might approach a particular situation or issue. While each of us displays all sixteen behavioral traits at different times and in different situations, we each possess a tendency to be comfortable more one way than the other. Your responses to the questions posed online will introduce which way you tend to behave under most circumstances relative to each of the four sets.

For example, you may prefer to be outgoing or extroverted versus retiring or introverted in social situations. You may tend to rely more on your senses versus intuition in perceiving things. In terms of how you make decisions, you might prefer to trust how you think about something rather than how you feel about it or vice versa.

Lastly and with regard to your overall orientation to situations, you may prefer to judge what you see versus perceive or draw conclusions. You may also fall precisely in the middle of any of these four sets of personality traits suggesting that you are neutral and may go one way or the other depending on a given situation.

In summary, your responses to the questions posed online will suggest that you fall into one of sixteen different Myers-Briggs personality types as shown in the table below.

ISTJ ISFJ INFJ INTJ
ISTP ISFP IINFP INTP
ESTP ESFP ENFP ENTP
ESTJ ESFJ ENFJ ENTJ

It is important for you to remember that none of these preferences suggests a right or a wrong personality, or a good or a bad assessment of who you are. The value of this exercise is to introduce to you a range of career opportunities that others who share your personality preferences have enjoyed pursuing.

To participate in this exercise, visit http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp. Your responses are confidential and once all of the questions are responded to and submitted, you will be taken to a page that introduces your personality profile. It may be useful to bookmark that page so that you can conveniently access it again in the future.

For more in depth information about the Jung Typology Test and an expanded explanation of your personality type from multiple perspectives, purchase Dynamics of Personality Type, Understanding and Applying Jung's Cognitive Processes by Linda V. Berens.

After you have finished the online Personality Profile exercise and reviewed your results, move on to What did you learn?


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