If you love your job, chances are your personality is a good match for the position.
Key Details
- New research has linked certain personalities to jobs that align with them.
- Working in a job not aligned with your personality and interests can leave you feeling unhappy, but working in a job aligned well can bring happiness and engagement.
- Many jobs hire candidates based on education, skills, and experience but this new study brings a brand new way of thinking to the job market.
Why it’s news
A new study that links personality traits to occupations could bring a brand new perspective to job hiring.
Many businesses focus strictly on education and experience, but looking at the personality study it might bring a shift in how jobs hire workers.
“This opens a clear route to job engagement through personality, which is a completely new door to understanding labor market economics,” says study author Paul McCarthy.
Only 11% of workers are in jobs that fit their personality perfectly, while about 25% are in jobs that are “not too bad a fit,” McCarthy says. That leaves 64% of the workforce in a less than ideal job.
“Basically, half the people in the Western world are probably in the wrong job,” he says.
In the study they discovered occupational “tribes.” The study reads, when personality is overlaid on a large set of occupations, patterns appear so that seemingly unrelated occupations are in fact related according to shared personality traits of people in those roles.
Using machine learning to cluster occupations based on shared personality trait combinations reveals eight occupational tribes each containing different sets of roles:
- Leaders: teaching, advisory, and agents
- Listeners: justice, social work, journalism
- Umpires: hospitality, beauty, personal services
- Rebels: artists, writers, film, and television
- Experts: medicine, technology, science
- Observers: design, music, entertainment
- Accomplishers: services, trades, and operations
- Fighters: construction, finance, professional sport
The analysis of the study showed that people whose personalities strongly align with their jobs have much higher levels of engagement and higher levels of happiness.
“This is continuing to show that people do congregate in certain professions, not by chance, but because there are biological predispositions that drive them toward professions where they fit well,” says biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher.
Effects
A new phenomenon sweeping the nation is quiet quitting, when workers are unhappy in a job and do the basics just to remain hired.
At least 50% of U.S. workers say they’re quiet quitting and possibly more than that, according to a Gallup survey.
The research suggests that quiet quitting might simply be a coping mechanism for a worker wanting to leave a job that is not aligned with their personality type.
