Everyone wants to be like Mike

During the younger years people are faced with that question of what do they do when they are older. Do they feel inspired to follow the career path of someone the know ? Do they want save the Forests ? Fight for justice ? Work Outdoors ? Run a noodle shop ? What is there dream job ?

One of the main influence on the person career is how they perceive the world. One psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment. It essentially labels people with a four letter acronym based on which subcategories they fall into. For instance ISFJ represents someone with a psychological preference for Intuition, Sensing, Feeling and Judging. I ISFJ personality type are considered to have the personality preference suited to caring for people accordingly are most likely to enjoy and be suited to nurturing roles. There around 14 % of people with this personality preference.                                          

I have performed a similar analysis of all 16 personality types in the table below. I have also included details of the average salary of the typical occupation that would be most enjoyed by that particular personality type.

Some observations were that there was marked difference between the average salary across personality types. In general it appears that job market paid valued the N suited roles (Intuition) more than the S suited roles (Sensing). Similarly, it appeared to be higher value placed on Extravert and Thinking roles.

If the job market is pricing particular personality types over others does this result in a society that will over time encourage people to grow up into having a particular personality type. Ie. in say a century would we have moved across to a society with a natural or learned personality type focused on being detached, pursuit of goals, detached ?

Then there the question why in particular occupations there such drive for everyone to be the person *Leading* people in their department. Is there an innate desire in everyone to be the head chef ? Like given there only 1.8% of people with the personality type that actually prefers such tasks it does seem that people are basically spending alot of the time doing course after course, up skiling and competing with other people to do a job that isnt even in the area which actually motivates them. Though saying that leadership roles do pay higher by society/job pricing market which probably explains the behaviour.

On the other end of the spectrum why are caring and helping jobs so devalued by society. A potential reason is that alot of society actually fall into these more caring/helping personality types. And so  with the numbers there be alot of people that would still be keen to work in these areas despite the pay.

The last thing I have done is look at what is viewed as the best job after factoring in stress, pay, creativity, work environment etc. It was generally found that the sweet spot was roles in science and university. I couldnt find some jobs in the top 200 (Police and Psychologist) even though they are probably some of the most crucial roles in society.

So yeh that just a bit of rambling on the jobs and personalities. In a bit of an over-simplistic model of one (of the many influences) effecting career decisions but would go some way to answering questions like why there seems such a different in personalities between Lawyers and Artists.

Speaking of personality preference sometimes people themselves dont know what there is so would suggest a test like this :P

Adios