The Best Way to Change Your Job Is to Focus on Your Personality

Researchers in Australia have discovered a way to remove some of the guesswork from changing professions. In December they published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that grouped more than 3,500 jobs by the personalities of the people in the roles, the first large-scale effort to trace these connections and let workers pinpoint careers they’re suited for across fields. Art dealers, for example, share personality traits with public-health directors and directors of education; certified financial planners are similar to internet marketing specialists and e-commerce managers.

Approaching a profession based on personality type is radically different from how people typically choose jobs; normally, being good at, say, writing or sales dictates decisions. “Skills and experience are important, but we know from employers that the most important attributes for long-term success and engagement are personality traits and other soft skills,” says co-author Paul McCarthy, an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of New South Wales.

The co-authors started by studying tweets from 236 elite computer programmers. The researchers fed hundreds of posts per programmer into software that looked at their writing and scored it based on s, needs, and the Big Five personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness. “When I first got the results, I thought we made a mistake—they all largely had the same personalities,” McCarthy says. The researchers repeated the process and got similar results with the top 344 tennis players worldwide and then with top scientists, architects, and doctors. Eventually, they examined about 128,000 Twitter users who had a job title in their bio that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recognized. The published findings included all jobs for which they had at least 50 Twitter users to analyze.

The results will get more precise as the researchers expand beyond Twitter and address the fact that the study maps the roles that people are in, not necessarily the best fit for their personalities. They plan to fix this issue by adding top performers in each field, just as they did with programmers, tennis players, etc.

The information could be valuable for workers in “sunset” industries, says Robin Ryan, a career counselor in Seattle and author of 60 Seconds & You’re Hired! Among other clients, she works with baby boomers who took severance packages from downsizing companies and didn’t know how tough it would be to find a new job. Study co-author Peggy Kern discovered that her own backup career might not work. “My exit plan was to go be a park ranger,” says Kern, an associate professor at the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne. Park rangers weren’t included in the findings (they’re not active on Twitter), but park superintendents share personalities with maintenance specialists, it turns out, not research psychologists.

Once a new potential role is identified, ABS Staffing’s Schur suggests, job seekers should network with people in the field and try side gigs. She transitioned from a private psychotherapy practice to career advising by visiting a recruitment agency. “The owner pulled me aside and said, ‘I think you should work here.’ It was the last thing I was thinking.”

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