Your type on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, that is.
When clients come to me wondering about identifying a new career or even a job change, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) is often a helpful personality assessment tool. Not because it’s going to magically give you a new career direction or a job title. As a personality assessment, it won’t tell you those things. There are other tools that can help with that.
Instead, the Myers-Briggs assessment will give you information about your preferences, what’s easiest or most natural for you. It would follow that a career or job that allows you to do what’s most natural for you and does not require a lot of work that’s difficult or unpleasant for you could set you up for success.
Based on Carl Jung’s “Theory of Psychological Type,” the MBTI has about 70 multiple questions which will give you a four-letter type code. From this you will discover:
- where you focus your attention (internally [I] or externally [E])
- how you take in information from the outside world (factually [S] or intuitively [N])
- how you make decisions (logically [T] or through your feelings [F])
- how you approach life (according to a structure or in a more fluid way; judging [J] or perceiving [P])
Combining those four choices will give you your Myers-Briggs type, such as ESTJ, INFP etc. out of a possible 16 combinations.
What we at Lansky Career Consultants especially like about the Myers-Briggs is that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad. The 4-letter code simply indicates what your preferences are. People often compare it to being right or left handed. You prefer using one hand to using the other, but you could use even the non-preferred hand — perhaps with less good results — given enough time.
In a job, you will probably be happiest and most successful leading with your preferences. For example, someone who prefers structure and making decisions based on logic will probably not be happy in a counseling role. S/he may even find a management role challenging since people don’t always want to behave according to rules. Similarly, someone who prefers to get information intuitively and to make decisions in a feeling-oriented way might struggle with a position in accounting or statistics.
In order to derive the most value about your career from the MBTI, you might consult a very useful book called Do What You Are by Paul Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger. There is a chapter about each one of the 16 Myers Briggs types, along with suggestions about careers that might be a fit for that type as well as information about the strengths and challenges that a person who prefers that type might encounter at work.
You can take the Myers-Briggs MBTI for free online (click here for one example) and refer to any one of the many books written on the Myers Briggs, for help with interpreting the results. Do What You Are is the book we recommend for insight about career questions.
However, to more thoroughly derive the benefits of the MBTI, we recommend that you take the assessment with a skilled administrator (we have one on staff) to maximize the information you can derive from the assessment and avoid misinterpretations. If interested, please give us a call at (312) 285-2000 or send an email to jlansky@lanskycareerconsultants.com.
