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Should I pick a career based on my personality type?

The report I got listed suggested careers for my type and a couple of them are things I have actually considered. How much weight should I put on that list?

The answer

Answered by Fpsycal

Very little weight on the list itself, and more on one specific thing underneath it.

Those lists are not built from outcome data. Nobody followed a cohort of one type into a profession and measured how they did; the list is generated by matching the adjectives in the type description to the adjectives in a job description. That is a plausible-sounding exercise with no predictive content, and it produces the same handful of careers for the same handful of codes across every site that publishes one.

What does predict job performance, in decades of published work: general cognitive ability, then conscientiousness, with everything else trailing and much of it job-specific. Personality overall is a real but modest predictor — useful in aggregate for an employer screening hundreds of candidates, close to useless for one person choosing between two paths. It cannot resolve your decision because the variation within any job is far larger than the difference between the average person in two jobs.

The part worth keeping is narrower and more useful: the specific conditions a role puts you in. Not "is this an INFP career", but how many hours of high-contact work per day, how much unpredictability, how much of the work is thinking alone versus out loud, how fast decisions have to close. Those map onto things you can actually measure about yourself, and they are what makes a job sustainable or exhausting regardless of whether the field suits your interests. The interest question is real and separate, and no personality instrument answers it.

So: use the result to work out what conditions cost you, and use something else entirely to choose the field.

Checkable with: Work Style, Social Battery, Drive & Perseverance, Core Values

Written by us rather than by a member, and not clinical advice. Where it rests on published research the answer says so, and where the evidence stops it says that too.

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Check it on yourself

Reading the answer and seeing your own numbers are different things. These are the assessments the answer above refers to.

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