Myers Briggs Career Test

It is easier to change your career to match your personality than to change your personality to match your career.

Personality is hard to change - careers are not. That's why so many people find it useful to take a personality test before searching for their first job or when changing careers. The Myers-Briggs - sometimes wrongly referred to as Meyers Briggs - test is the most popular personality test in the world. Over 2 Million people a year take the test and hundreds of biggest companies in the world use it for filtering applicants.

Let's have a look at what the Myers-Briggs test is, what it does, and if it can provide you with some career choice insights.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) divides everyone into one of 16 personality types. These 16 types are the result of your individual score on four dimensions. These four dimensions are depicted below. You have extraversion vs introversion, sensing vs intuition, thinking vs feeling, and judging vs perceiving. On each of these dimensions, you score either high or low. The combination of these four scores determines your personality type.

For example, I am an ENTJ. Each letter stands for my score on a single dimension. E.g. E means that on the dimension of extraversion vs introversion I belong to the extraverts.

On each of these dimensions you can score high or low, but you can never fall on both sides of the spectrum. All possible combination of these four dimensions result in 16 personality types in total. It sounds reasonable. In technical terms the MBTI is based on a typology of personality , somewhat influenced by Carl Gustav Jung's archetypes and typologies. Typology means that people can be divided into different types of personality that are different from each other in a meaningful sense. According to my type ENTJ - also called The Commander - I project charisma, confidence, and am a natural born leader¹.

But does the Myers-Briggs test help when making life or career choices? Let's look at the science!

Before we can answer that question we need to understand how to judge a personality test. How do we know if a test is any good? In psychology - psychometrics specifically - we look at two big factors: reliability and validity. For a personality test to be scientifically sound it needs to be extremely reliable and have high validity. There are multiple ways to test this. We will focus on the foundational ones. Strap in for a crash course in psychometrics.

Now that we know how to judge a personality test, let's look at the Myers-Briggs test again and evaluate if it's reliable and valid for aiding in making career choices. Is the Myers-Briggs reliable? Some studies show that 50% of people who re-test after 5 weeks receive a different personality type the second time around². Other studies found better reliability scores³. Overall, reliability seems to be on the low end. That is not a good sign. If you take the test twice, you might get a different result. It seems our measuring tool is somewhat stretchy.

What about the validity of the Myers-Briggs test? Does it provide any predictive insight into life outcomes or career success? There has been no evidence that your Myers-Briggs result has any influence on your career success⁴. This lack of evidence does not mean that the Myers-Briggs test has no predictive value on your career success. However, it is a sign that we should be careful when interpreting the results. Claiming any predictive value for the Myers-Briggs test is not supported by science.

Let's look at the four dimensions described by the test and see what we find if we dig a little deeper.

3 steps to a new career

There are only three steps to take charge of your career path.

1. Take the personality career test
2. Unlock your career matches
3. Find a meaningful career

The dichotomies of the Myers-Briggs test

The MBTI claims that personality consists of four dimensions or personality traits. Let's examine them in detail.

Does it make sense that people are either extraverted or introverted? If you're high in introversion you probably won't be high in extraversion? So if you're shy and aloof you won't be the biggest party animal. That makes intuitive sense and tracks with what we see in our friends and co-workers - and it also is what the science shows. In other words, extraversion and introversion lie indeed on opposite sides of the same dimension.

But what about thinking vs feeling?

We can all imagine extremely rational people who are bad with empathy and social situations. And our modern pop culture definitely leans heavily on this stereotype - e.g. The Big Bang Theory. However, many of us also know people who are intelligent and rational yet still are able to be highly sensitive to others emotions and feelings. This is also what the science shows. People with high empathy can also be high in rational thinking and people who are low in empathy don't automatically over analyze everything. In fact, there is evidence that people who are more intelligent also show higher levels of compassion⁵. This is a problem for this dimension of of the MBTI. It does not make sense - neither intuitively nor scientifically - to depict thinking vs feeling as one trait.

So, a more accurate depiction of this dimension would be two dimensions, where one focuses on thinking and curiosity and the other on empathy and compassion. This is what the science tells us.

Another problem that psychologists discovered with the Myers-Briggs test is that it completely misses one core personality dimension. It ignores negative emotions. How likely you are to be anxious, nervous, worried, full of doubt, or emotionally volatile. If you deal with anxiety or worries on a regular basis you know how much of your thoughts and behaviors are focused on these emotions. As Adam Grant put it: "That's like a physical exam that ignores your torso and one arm."⁶. This is a huge issue. We know from recent studies that the dimension of negative emotions is a crucial predictor for life outcomes such as depression, divorce rate, and overall happiness⁸.

There is one more thing we need to look at. The very same thing that makes it so attractive to people online and in companies is - ironically - its biggest flaw: types.

Humans naturally enjoy putting things into neat categories and labels on people. It comes natural. When it comes to personality, unfortunately, the fundamental problem is that it doesn't work like that.

If the Myers-Briggs idea of types is correct - most people are either introverted or extraverted - then we would expect for people to score either mostly high or mostly low on questions for this dimension. Scientifically, we would expect a bi-modal distribution; a lot of people at the low end of the spectrum, barely any in the middle, and a lot of people at the high end. However, that is not what we find. If you ask people 10 questions that assess their extraversion, you will find that most people score in the middle. Further from the center you will find fewer and fewer people.

Such a distribution is extremely common and is called a normal distribution. It is the same distribution that we find for height, weight, and IQ. But also for things in nature like how many fruits are on a tree or how many leaves are on a branch. Most people are not extremely overweight or extremely tall. Most people are not extremely intelligent or extremely stupid. Most branches are not devoid of leaves. And similarly, most people are not extremely extraverted or extremely introverted.

The problem with the Myers-Briggs test is that it - by assuming a bi-modal distribution - cuts through the center of this spectrum and says: Everyone to the left of the middle is introverted and everyone on the right is extraverted. This completely destroys the normal distribution and cleaves it in half at it's thickest point^4,8,9.

People that are very close to each other (just right and left of center) will be classified as different personalities even though they are basically the same. Sadly, there is no way around this problem.

This also explains the MBTI's issue with reliability. Most people are somewhere around the middle of any given personality dimension. Since people give slightly different answers on different moments, a person who was classified as extravert a month ago might now find themselves just on the other side of the divide¹⁰.

The only conclusion to draw from this is that dividing people into types is a very tenuous task. Our personality and behavior is more like a probability distribution than a single type. That's why most people kind of intuitively feel like they are both extravert and introvert - it's because they are.

What is our view of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?

Is it fun to do? Sure! There's nothing wrong with taking a Myers-Briggs test - or even a few - and seeing between which types you hover. But it's important to note that it's not a scientific test. It's a fun way to learn about yourself and others. It's a fun way to learn about the different ways people think and behave. But it's not a scientific test.

Hopefully, by now, you have become more skeptical of the Myers-Briggs type indicator as a predictive tool. But if the MBTI does not hold any predictive value, are there other tests that do?

The gold standard of modern personality psychology is the Big 5 personality test. Compared to many other personality tests it is not based on a single person's intuition about personality. It was derived from a model-free analysis of the data of thousands of people. Over the last 30 years this test has proven to predict life and career outcomes.

The Big 5 personality test is sometimes referred to as OCEAN, because it is based on the following five personality dimensions:

Openness

Conscientiousness

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

The Big 5 personality test can predict many things about us ^7,11,12,13. Some examples are:

The Big 5 scores high on reliability and validity. You receive very similar results today, tomorrow, and a year from now. It predicts success in life and jobs.