Myers Briggs® Personality Profile

A personality assessment to help you with your career change

I love the Myers-Briggs® personality profile – it is one of my favourite personality assessments. In fact it is one of my favourite tools of any kind for helping career changers work out what will be a better career route for them to follow.

In my work as a career coach, I often find that it is this exercise – the Myers-Briggs® personality profile – that gives clients the biggest ‘aha!’ moments as they explore who they are and what they want to do.

So what makes it so helpful? Well it contributes to your career change thinking in a number of different ways.

Career changers need to really get to know themselves

When you are thinking of making a big change of career direction, it is important that you take your time to get to know who you really are, so that your new career ideas will be a good ‘fit’ for you.

Most career change guides focus on values, skills and interests – and I include these in the information on this site – but personality is often overlooked.

But an understanding of your personality is essential if you are to be able to make a sensible assessment of a new career. You may have developed skills and interests through the things you have done in your life so far, but it is your inborn personal style that can decide whether you will really feel ‘at home’ in a new career.

The Myers-Briggs® personality profile leaves you feeling good about yourself

Some personality tests can leave you feeling a bit inadequate. If you are an introvert, you are left thinking you are a bit of a party pooper. How will you feel if you score highly on ‘neuroticism’ or low on ‘agreeableness’?! Hmmm, not wonderful!

The beauty of the Myers-Briggs® personality profile is that it celebrates our strengths. However you come out on the assessment, you are helped to see the benefits of your preferred approach to life and in terms of work, you see how you can always make a positive contribution.

Helps you understand your own preferences

The test helps you to recognise what energises you and what drains you. You get to see how you prefer to gather information – whether you take a step by step or a lateral approach. You find out what you prefer to use as the basis for decisions and you understand more about your approach to life – are you orderly or go-with-the-flow?

Once you understand yourself better, you can assess your current job and any future careers with this knowledge in mind.

Helps you to understand others

But you don’t get to just understand yourself. The Myers-Briggs® personality profile gives you an awareness which helps you to understand other people better. This can be invaluable at work in helping you to get on with colleagues, managing your manager and working effectively in teams.

Pretty well all jobs require you to work with others either one-to-one or in groups and so anything which helps you to do this more effectively is worth its weight in gold!

But it doesn’t tell you everything

Your personality is a complex mix of many factors and no personality assessment, however well researched can give you a complete picture. Your personality will evolve over time as you are shaped by your life experiences and by the circumstances you find yourself in.

So the test does not say everything about you but it can still give you some fascinating new insights into what makes you tick and give you the tools and language to talk about it to yourself and to others.

If you’d like to read more about the Myers-Briggs® personality profile, then take a look at the personality pages on this site where you can even take a short self assessment.

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