Job Vacancies And Jobs Search In Malaysia : Allyhunt

Are you the type that act first and reflect later or the other way round? How about working alone versus working in teams?

People’s personalities can play a major role in their career choices. For example, someone who prefers outdoor might be miserable in a sedentary desk job. Likewise, people who prefer working alone excel as specialists in their own right but often make poor team members.

According to Myers-Briggs theory, each of us is born with a predisposition for certain personality preferences. There are four pairs of preference alternatives:-

Extraverted or introverted

Sensing or intuitive

Thinking or Feeling

Judging or Perceiving

These eight descriptions merely reflect preferences. In other words, if you are right handed, it does not mean that you never use your left hand, but merely that you prefer the right. According to Myers-Briggs theory, we each develop a preference early in life and remain in it. It would be extremely unlikely, for example, that an extravert will ever become an introvert, or vice versa.

The first pair of preference: Extraverted versus introverted – describe the tendency to be either outer-directed or inner-directed in one’s emotional focus. They are polar-opposite qualities – a vivid example: amidst a loud, boisterous party, some individuals quickly become giddy, excited, even exuberant, and find themselves charged up. Others, however, in the exact same setting, soon feel sapped, drained, and even emotionally numb. Extraverts enjoy participating in meetings and work teams, and generating ideas in the company of others.

Introverts on the other hand would be happy in relatively solitary jobs such as computer programming, accounting, research and professional writing.

The second pair of preference: Sensor versus intuitive; this refers to how we gather information about the world. Sensors seek specific answers to specific questions, enjoy practical tasks with tangible results, focus on the present, prefer working with facts and data rather than with imagination and desire specific instructions. In contrast, intuitives enjoy thought experiments, speculation, theory building and they seek generalities rather than specifics. Sensors are good for day-to-day administrative and operations work.

The third pair of preference: thinkers versus feelers; this refers to how we make decisions once we have gathered information. Thinkers pride on their logic, analytic ability, objectivity and impersonality – believing it’s more important to be right than to be liked. Almost all organizational settings favor thinkers for supervisory or managerial positions. Feelers seek harmony rather than fairness or clarity and tend to overextend themselves to meet others’ needs. Interestingly, research suggests that thinking and feeling are the only two preferences that are gender-related; about two-thirds of men are thinkers and about the same proportion of women are feelers.

The last pair of preference: judges versus perceivers; this pertains to how people prefer to orient their lives. Judges prefer decisiveness, planning, punctuality, order, tidiness, organization, adherence to schedules, and control. “A place for everything and everything in its place” is their motto. Conversely, perceivers prefer flexibility, spontaneity and adaptiveness and they abhor structure and routine. Judgers are more likely to be found in hierarchical settings such as governmental agencies and large corporations; perceivers are more comfortable in setting their own hours with minimal rules, and are often self-employed or entrepreneurial.

If you have not done a personality test before, do take one soon (there are many free tests in the internet) and answer the questions as honestly as possible to get to know yourself a bit better. There is no right or wrong answer. Every personality trait has its strengths and weaknesses. The essential thing is by knowing your own personality, you would have a higher chance of getting into a job that suits you better. The more you work at a job that meshes with who you are, the greater your chances of entering a long term career that is successful and fulfilling.

Source Hoffman, Edward Psychological Testing At Work, 73-76. McGraw-Hill, 2002