Thinking about taking a career personality test?  This can be a great way to begin exploring potential career matches that jive well with your unique personality.

Gaining a deeper understanding of yourself and how your mind works is necessary in order to make a good decision about what career path you wish to pursue.  Its also helpful to have this strong self-awareness in all other aspects of life too.  Personality Inventories (aka “personality tests”) can be a very helpful tool in this regard, in that they prompt you into some self-reflection and can provide a helpful framework for better understanding your own personality and your respective strengths and challenges.

There are many different approaches to the study of personality and whether one should focus more on traits or types, fixed traits or states, or even which personality test is the best, most accurate or most useful. Regardless of those debates, almost any personality test can still be an excellent tool to aid in self-examination and self-assessment and can help you on your journey to a better self-understanding – as well as finding careers and jobs that fit with your unique personality.  Learn more about the most popular personality tests for career exploration below:

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The "16 Types" Model

Unlike the other models on this page, the “16 Personality Types” refers to a multiple different type-based personality inventories and tests that are all originally based on the work of Dr. Carl Jung. The 16 distinct 4×2 letter acronym types were first named in conjunction with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) and later the same acronyms were used in the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Today these 16 types are the most well-known in the field of personality typing and thus are also used as the resulting type outputs from a myriad of different type test providers.

Related: I’m a student. How can the 16 personality types model guide my career direction?

Enneagram

The Enneagram is a model of human psyche based on a 3×3 arrangement resulting in 9 interconnected personality types. Each personality type also has a stress point and security point. For example, a Type 5 person may act like a Type 8 when feeling secure, or like a Type 7 during times of stress.  Likewise, each type can have a “wing” of an adjacent number, thus resulting in 18 (or 27) total possible type variations. The Enneagram test is particularly popular in Christian communities though it is also widely used in secular communities as well.

The DISC assessment is one of the most popular personality assessments to date. The DISC assessment measures personality types across four dimensions, namely: Dominance (D), influence (i), Steadiness (S) and Conscientious (C).  It then breaks out different combinations of these dimensions to produce 12 total personality types.

The DISC assessment is more focused on behavior than some of the other other popular models, and is heavily used in the workplace particularly by many large employers.

Holland Codes (RIASEC)

The Holland Codes were introduced by American psychologist John Holland in the 1970’s. It is one of the only personality theories that looks specifically at personality in relation to careers and vocational choices. As such, it’s one of our favorite models.

The Holland Code measure personality across six types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional, with personality being a blend across all six types for a total of 720 possible combinations. It then matches those combinations to different workplace environments. Using the Holland Code, we can narrow down a huge list of careers to the ones that promote work environments best fit our personality. 

Related: How are you intelligent? An introduction to the RIASEC model

 

The Big Five model, also referred to as OCEAN or the “Five Factor Model”, is a trait-based personality model which means it aims to help you better understand your traits without grouping them together into “types”.  While not as widely-known at the DISC or “16 Types” models, the Big Five generally has more support from academia and scores high marks for both its validity and reliability as a personality testing tool. The model evaluates personality traits each on a sliding scale of these five components: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.