7.6 Self-exploration – Personality, Interests, & Skills

Every artist was first an amateur. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, author

Now that you have reviewed the concepts of goal setting and identified values most important to you, the next part of the career development process will help you to reflect on personal preferences. By doing this, you will understand the work environment that you will naturally find a greater fit in. The career development process is all about you. You are a unique individual with a distinct combination of personality traits, skills, and interests, skills. Self knowledge can help you in your career decision-making process to discover careers that are the best match for you.

Personality Type

Taking the time to ensure that your personality is compatible with your career choice is extremely important. If you do not invest the time now to figure out what makes you happy and keeps you motivated everyday, you could be very unhappy in the future. But why is personality so important? Learning about your personality allows you to think about your emotions, behaviors, and ways of thinking on a day to day basis. For example, do you prefer to work alone or do you prefer to work with others? Would you be content in a career that requires that you are extremely organized and have a set schedule? Or are you the type of person that likes to have an open, flexible schedule that allows you to be spontaneous? This information will assist you in deciding which career(s) match with your personality preferences.

To review personality preferences, one of the most common tools used to understand personality preferences is based on the personality theory from Myers and Briggs. Businesses use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) to find out more about the personalities of their potential employees (very commonly used by police departments), some universities use the MBTI to learn more about the personalities of potential graduate students considering psychology, counseling, and social work fields, and it commonly used in couples therapy (to help both individuals in a relationship understand each other and their behaviors better).

Watch the following video to get an introduction of four facets that comprise the 16 possible personality types.

PERSONALITY THEORY: THE 4 FACETS

• Extroversion-Introversion (EI): how you get your energy and where you prefer to focus your attention
• Sensing-Intuition (SN): how you take in information about the world around you
• Thinking-Feeling (TF): how you like to make decisions
• Judging-Perceiving (JP): how you prefer to organize your life

Complete the following activity to identify your personality type based on your own self-reflection. As part of the course requirement, you will also be taking the MBTI personality test through our career center. Please check the syllabus for instructions. You can complete the following quick activity to self-identify your personality type. Then compare the results with the actual MBTI assessment to see how your results are similar and different.

Work Styles

O*NET OnLine provides an online tool that helps you to review your personal characteristics and how they can affect how well one performs a job. This tool is available via the Work Styles search function on O*NET OnLine. You can browse O*Net data by clicking on the quality that you think best represents you including achievement, innovation, and leadership to explore the different jobs that will require the specific characteristic.

Skills

In addition to personality, skills are also important to consider in the career development process. If you lived and worked in colonial times in the United States, what skills would you need to be gainfully employed? What kind of person would your employer want you to be? And how different would your skills and aptitudes be then, compared to today?

Many industries that developed during the 1600s–1700s, such as health care, publishing, manufacturing, construction, finance, and farming, are still with us today. And the professional abilities, aptitudes, and values required in those industries are many of the same ones employers seek today.

For example, in the health care field then, just like today, employers looked for professionals with scientific insight, active listening skills, a service orientation, oral comprehension abilities, and teamwork skills. And in the financial field then, just like today, employers looked for economics and accounting skills, mathematical reasoning skills, clerical and administrative skills, and deductive reasoning.

Why is it that with the passage of time and all the changes in the work world, some skills remain unchanged (or little changed)? The answer might lie in the fact there are are two main types of skills that employers look for: hard skills and soft skills.

HARD SKILLS & SOFT SKILLS

• Hard skills are concrete or objective abilities that you learn and perhaps have mastered. They are skills you can easily quantify, like using a computer, speaking a foreign language, or operating a machine. You might earn a certificate, a college degree, or other credentials that attest to your hard-skill competencies. Obviously, because of changes in technology, the hard skills required by industries today are vastly different from those required centuries ago.
• Soft skills, on the other hand, are subjective skills that have changed very little over time. Such skills might pertain to the way you relate to people, or the way you think, or the ways in which you behave—for example, listening attentively, working well in groups, and speaking clearly. Soft skills are sometimes also called “transferable skills” because you can easily transfer them from job to job or profession to profession without much training.

What Employers Want in an Employee

Employers want individuals who have the necessary hard and soft skills to do the job well and adapt to changes in the workplace. Soft skills may be especially in demand today because employers are generally equipped to train new employees in a hard skill—by training them to use new computer software, for instance—but it’s much more difficult to teach an employee a soft skill such as developing rapport with coworkers or knowing how to manage conflict. An employer might rather hire an inexperienced worker who can pay close attention to details than an experienced worker who might cause problems on a work team.

In this section, you will look at ways of identifying and building particular hard and soft skills that will be necessary for your career path. You will also learn how to use your time and resources wisely to acquire critical skills for your career goals.

Transferable Skills for Any Career Path

Transferable (soft) skills may be used in multiple professions. They include, but are by no means limited to, skills listed below:

• Dependable and punctual (showing up on time, ready to work, not being a liability)
• Self-motivated
• Enthusiastic
• Committed
• Willing to learn (lifelong learner)
• Able to accept constructive criticism
• A good problem solver
• Strong in customer service skills
• Adaptable (willing to change and take on new challenges)
• A team player
• Positive attitude
• Strong communication skills
• Good in essential work skills (following instructions, possessing critical thinking skills, knowing limits)
• Ethical
• Safety conscious
• Honest
• Strong in time management

For more extensive exploration, visit this checklist of transferable skills from Community Employment Services in Woodstock, Ontario.

These skills are transferable because they are positive attributes that are invaluable in practically any kind of work. They also do not require much training from an employer—you have them already and take them with you wherever you go. Soft skills are a big part of your “total me” package.

So, identify the soft skills that show you off the best, and identify the ones that prospective employers are looking for. By comparing both sets, you can more directly gear your job search to your strongest professional qualities.

10 Top Skills You Need to Get a Job When You Graduate

The following video summarizes the ten top skills that the Target corporation believes will get you a job when you graduate. You can read a transcript of the video here.

Assessing Your Skills and Interests

In this section you will continue to assess your skills and your interests in more depth. Most career assessment tests created to measure skills and interests are based on the career theory developed by Dr. John Holland.

The following video provides you with an introduction to the world of work and Holland’s Occupational Themes:

As mentioned in the video, Holland defined six categories of people based on personality, interests, and skills:

1. Realistic: These people describe themselves as honest, loyal, and practical. They are doers more than thinkers. They have strong mechanical, motor, and athletic abilities; like the outdoors; and prefer working with machines, tools, plants, and animals.
2. Investigative: These people love problem solving and analytical skills. They are intellectually stimulated and often mathematically or scientifically inclined; like to observe, learn, and evaluate; prefer working alone; and are reserved.
3. Artistic: These people are the “free spirits.” They are creative, emotional, intuitive, and idealistic; have a flair for communicating ideas; dislike structure and prefer working independently; and like to sing, write, act, paint, and think creatively. They are similar to the investigative type but are interested in the artistic and aesthetic aspects of things more than the scientific.
4. Social: These are “people” people. They are friendly and outgoing; love to help others, make a difference, or both; have strong verbal and personal skills and teaching abilities; and are less likely to engage in intellectual or physical activity.
5. Enterprising: These people are confident, assertive risk takers. They are sociable; enjoy speaking and leadership; like to persuade rather than guide; like to use their influence; have strong interpersonal skills; and are status conscious.
6. Conventional: These people are dependable, detail oriented, disciplined, precise, persistent, and practical; value order; and are good at clerical and numerical tasks. They work well with people and data, so they are good organizers, schedulers, and project managers.

Learn Specific Skills Necessary for Your Career Path

The table below lists four resources to help you determine which concrete skills are needed for all kinds of professions. You can even discover where you might gain some of the skills and which courses you might take.

Spend some time reviewing each resource. You will find many interesting and exciting options. When you’re finished, you may decide that there are so many interesting professions in the world that it’s difficult to choose just one. This is a good problem to have!

Online Skills Identification Resources

Acquiring Necessary Skills (both in and out of class) for Your Career Goals

“Lifelong learning” is a buzz phrase in the twentieth-first century because we are inundated with new technology and information all the time, and those who know how to learn, continuously, are in the best position to keep up and take advantage of these changes. Think of all the information resources around you: colleges and universities, libraries, the Internet, videos, games, books, films—the list goes on.

With these resources at your disposal, how can you best position yourself for lifelong learning and a strong, viable career? Which hard and soft skills are most important? What are employers really looking for?

The following list was inspired by the remarks of Mark Atwood, director of open-source engagement at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. It contains excellent practical advice.

• Learn how to write clearly. After you’ve written something, have people edit it. Then rewrite it, taking into account the feedback you received. Write all the time.
• Learn how to speak. Speak clearly on the phone and at a table. For public speaking, try Toastmasters. “Meet and speak. Speak and write.”
• Be reachable. Publish your email so that people can contact you. Don’t worry about spam.
• Learn about computers and computing, even if you aren’t gearing for a career in information technology. Learn something entirely new every six to twelve months.
• Build relationships within your community. Use tools like Meetup.com and search for clubs at local schools, libraries, and centers. Then, seek out remote people around the country and world. Learn about them and their projects first by searching the Internet.
• Attend conferences and events. This is a great way to network with people and meet them face-to-face.
• Find a project and get involved. Start reading questions and answers, then start answering questions.
• Collaborate with people all over the world.
• Keep your LinkedIn profile and social media profiles up-to-date. Be findable.
• Keep learning. Skills will often beat smarts. Be sure to schedule time for learning and having fun!

Just Get Involved

After you’ve networked with enough people and built up your reputation, your peers can connect you with job openings that may be a good fit for your skills. The video, below, from Monash University in Australia offers the following tips:

1. Get involved in part-time work
2. Get involved in extracurricular activities
3. Get involved with employment and career development

“Just Get involved. There are so many opportunities and open doors for you.”