How to choose a career path based on your MBTI personality and interests

How to choose a career path based on your MBTI personality and interests

When you have trouble navigating something, it’s because you’ve either lost direction or never had it in the first place. To reach your destination, you may need some spatial awareness – and a good map.

To help lead the way during National Career Development month, we invited Collegiate Gateway Founder and President Julie Raynor Gross to join us on The Myers-Briggs Company Podcast. Julie sat down with host Melissa Summer to talk about how you can use your personality and interests as markers on the road to your ideal career.

Julie is career coach, a Master Practitioner of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator^® (MBTI) and a Certified Practitioner of the Strong Interest Inventory^®. She’s given hundreds of people personalized, expert guidance on which education and career paths to take.

There was so much good information in the podcast episode that we separated the recap into three parts (read the first one here). Now let’s move on to a recap of the middle of the episode. This part of the conversation covered everything from team personalities to life hacks for making big decisions. Here are some highlights:

Choosing a career is a big decision. Is there a way to simplify it?

Julie helps people through some of the most significant decisions of their lives: where they want to go to school, what they want to study, and what they want to do as a career. While those choices and their outcomes are innately complex, Julie shared a way to simplify the process of making big decisions:

How exactly can personality type and interests help people with career choices?

A camp counselor once told me and my friends to “find a need and fill it.” It was in reference to a day where we all chipped in to pick up litter, hose down equipment, and do some general cleanup. That advice has always stuck with me. It’s helpful when choosing a career too – especially when you can find some overlap between what people need, what you enjoy doing, and what you’re good at.

These days, that overlap is more accessible than ever.

Industries like social media, gaming, green energy, artificial intelligence (AI), and user experience (UX) have opened up a whole new world of possible career choices. If you feel uninspired or like you don’t know where to begin, Julie knows just what to do:

Is there such a thing as a “team personality” in an organization?

Several years ago, my colleagues and I went through the MBTI Teams experience at a company retreat. While we were there, a certified MBTI practitioner explained the intricacies of our personality types and took us through some immensely helpful team-building exercises. We discovered that everyone on our team had NF (Intuition + Feeling) as the middle two letters in our MBTI type.

At the time, it felt like such a coincidence, but was it? While our exact roles differ, we’re all technically in the public relations and marketing industry. Could this mean there’s such a thing as an overarching team personality type? For instance, is it more likely that a group of nurses would have a preference for the SF (Sensing + Feeling) combination? Here’s what Julie had to say about this (quotes slightly adapted for clarity):

Want to learn more about your MBTI personality type and what careers you’d be most satisfied in? Check out MBTIonline Careers, where you’ll get your official, research-backed MBTI type, over 300 careers with predicted satisfaction scores based on your unique personality type, mini courses on career development and more.

Interested in reading more about the intersection of careers and personality type? Check out the blogs Career exploration for Introverted personality types and Career exploration for Extraverted personality types.