If you've done our personality quiz, you will have built up a profile of your characteristics and personal skills. Next, match the outcome of this assessment against a job description or occupational profile. This will help you to find the opportunities that best suit you.
Personality counts
It's vital to consider your personality carefully when targeting a career. If you're an extrovert you probably won't be happy doing lab work or working alone in a routine office job. If you're not such a live wire, don't push yourself into a job like sales or customer liaison, where you will probably be meeting new people every day.
Do you have an unquenchable curiosity and an interest in how things work? Are you keen on discussions and arguments, or working in teams? Do you enjoy being the centre of attention, giving presentations and explaining things? Or are you the creative type, with a passion for design, colour and innovation?
Understanding what you enjoy doing (and are or could be good at), helps you aim for occupations that match your talents and interests. And if you know what you dislike, it's easier to avoid jobs where those features predominate. You also need to be completely honest with yourself about factors beyond your control (like physical fitness, allergies and location restriction), which may limit your career choice.
Types of jobs
At a very basic level, jobs can be divided into those concerning data, those concerning people, those concerning things and those concerning ideas. Most jobs will include elements of more than one of these. If you are interested in people, you might explore jobs like marketing, selling, medicine and education. If data is your thing, you could look at accounting or information management. Those who love ideas could focus on areas like design or legal services. And people who enjoy practical pursuits could consider careers such as horticulture, engineering or construction. You can see how building up a profile of your personal qualities and interests will help you decide which areas will be most attractive for you.
Finding information
There are several tools and techniques that will help you to make a choice. Two books that contain a variety of exercises to help you discover what's most important to you about your work are:
What Colour Is Your Parachute? Richard Nelson Bolles
Build Your Own Rainbow Barrie Hopson and Mike Scally
Useful sites are:
The Career Key, which measures your skills, abilities, values, interests and personality. It also identifies promising jobs and provides information about them.
The Personality Page where, for a small fee, you can obtain a reasonably reliable personality profile using a test based on the work of Carl Jung, Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs. The website also contains information on personality types, careers and personal growth.
There's plenty of advice and help around, but in the end it's important to do what feels right for you. If you are to succeed, you must take an active approach to career development in which you take responsibility, rather than allowing other people to plan for you.
Making a compromise
Although it would be wonderful to find the perfect match, in careers, as in most other areas of life, it is often important to compromise. For example, if you hate a long commute, you may be prepared to put up with a job that is not quite right rather than face the torture of three hours' travel every day. If you need a certain level of salary, you may decide to take a job that does not quite suit other aspects of your personality or values profiles. The essence of effective career development is to be aware of the choices and trade-offs open to you, rather than feeling forced into doing something that does not match your needs and wants.
The key to making a good choice is to recognise that assessing yourself and identifying the work you want involve the same processes – relating past experiences to future opportunities. Your social or leisure pursuits can be very relevant in developing this understanding. Why do you enjoy them? What transferable skills have you gained from pursuing them? The point in assessing yourself is not only which qualities, experiences and skills you have, but what led you to choose or develop them.
The more you understand yourself, the easier it is to make the right choices – it's an interesting and enjoyable journey.
