Match Your Profession to Your Personality

Uncertain about the career you picked? One of the better places to look for an answer is your own personality. Most people have several fields they could happily settle into, but finding them means taking an honest inventory of your traits and then seeing which jobs let those traits do their best work. Be truthful with yourself about who you actually are, then hold that up against a range of career paths and notice where the overlap is strongest.

Since the whole point of a career is earning a comfortable living, it helps to steer toward work that employers actually want. So the smart order of operations is this: look first at the fields that are in demand, then ask which personality types tend to thrive in them. A few of those fields are worth walking through.

Take IT and software engineering. Technology keeps expanding, and getting a foothold there opens up an almost open-ended set of possibilities. The catch is that the work asks for people who can take complex projects and run with them on their own. You need a genuine appetite for picking up new skills, because the tools and languages you learn today will shift under you tomorrow. Close attention to detail matters, as does the ability to concentrate for long stretches and juggle several projects at once without dropping any of them.

Physical therapy sits in the medical world and centers on helping people climb back from injury or illness. The job outlook has been strong, with projections at one point calling for growth of roughly 39 percent through 2020. Emotional strength is part of the job description here. Not every patient is easy. Some hit setbacks, some resist the treatment plan, and both happen often enough that you should expect them rather than be surprised by them. Steadiness under that kind of pressure is what carries you.

If you'd rather help people straighten out their money, a financial advisor role fits that instinct. The mix of skills it demands is broad: comfort with numbers, an easy way with people, and enough fluency with current technology to run your tools efficiently. Problem-solving matters too, since many clients arrive with tangled portfolios, and some of them show up precisely because they're in the middle of a financial crisis. Handling the math is non-negotiable, but so is handling the personalities attached to it.

Then there's interpreting and translating. The economy is global now, and that creates real demand for people who can open up communication between cultures and backgrounds. A translator has to listen closely, because the job is to carry exactly what one person says over to the other party, without distortion. You also have to think on your feet and respond fast, and your attention to detail needs to be sharp. One hard requirement: genuine fluency in at least two languages, not mere proficiency. Settle for proficiency and the whole thing can come apart on you.

That gives you a working sense of where the demand is and which kinds of people tend to fit each field. Read through the traits that matter in a given profession and ask yourself candidly how many of them describe you. As a rough rule, you want most of the listed traits for a field before you count yourself a good match. Once you've found that fit, the next question is practical: what training will actually get you into the work your personality points toward.

References: http://www.livescience.com/41313-personality-traits.html, http://www.businessinsider.com/best-jobs-for-every-personality-2014-9