Your Personality and the Workplace

Setting the Stage

Personality includes an individual’s temperament, attitudes, and styles of interacting with people and the world around them that is modified by life circumstances.  Personality has a major influence on job and career satisfaction, as well as on job performance.  

Material & Preparation

• Arrange for computer and internet access for students working in pairs or groups.
• Students could complete their personality inventory/profile using one of the resources provided below.
• Download the Personality & Career Suitability Reproducible (1 per student) [Google Doc] [Word Doc] [PDF]

What to Do

Provide students with a copy of the Personality & Career Suitability Reproducible and direct them to the Let’s Talk Science careers resource.  From the resources, they will select two Career Profiles for a career or sector of interest to them. They will then summarize the major interests and values that the people in the profiles appear to have.  

Teachers may wish to provide students with an example from a profile such as Tegan Mierle. Tegan is outgoing, enjoys or values working with people, values creativity, learning new things, getting feedback, physical activity and the outdoors. Depending on the depth to which teachers take the personal profile aspects, students could attempt to assign specific personality types and provide supporting evidence from the profile. 

After they have completed this summary, if not already completed, students will complete a personality survey using an available service, such as those listed below.  They will then compare the list they made using the profiles with their own results. Do they share interests with the people in the profiles? Do they think their results would make them good candidates for the occupation(s) in these profiles? Why/why not? 

As an extension, students can refer to the “know yourself” section of the CareerInsite website to develop a more comprehensive picture of their interests, values and abilities.  

The following websites may also be of interest:

16Personalities.com Free Personality Test (Accessed January 14, 2020)
Humanmetrics Free Personality Test (Accessed January 14, 2020)
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Personality Inventory Basics (Accessed January 14, 2020)