Careers, MBTI, Big Five, Personality

Response to Kira Riehm’s “What’s Your Type?”

The first time I heard about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment (MBTI) was from my boyfriend, but the first time I ever really encountered it was in my Intro to Personality class taught by Richard Koestner (an awesome class for anyone who is interested in social psych!) The test was briefly mentioned in the textbook that we used for his class. All I really learned was that although this is a fun test, the reliability of the test is severely flawed. Because of this, I never took the test.

SO I just took the test. My type is ENFP which stands for Extravert, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceiving. According to this test, I have more of these qualities than their opposites, i.e. Introversion, Sensing, Thinking and Judging. I’ve taken a pretty reliable test on the Big Five Personality traits and consistently scored 98% for extroversion, so the MBTI test got one thing right! (By the way, if anyone is interested in taking the Big Five traits test you can access it here: http://personality-testing.info/tests/BIG5.php)

Kira warned against trusting anything the MBTI states about career choices, so the first place I went was career choices. The career choices they chose for me seem surprisingly accurate! “ENFPs are effective in occupations involving a lot of intellectual work that is focused on humanities and social science and requiring creativity”. Ok, so that’s very general! Nonetheless, they suggest that I go into something like social work, counseling, and psychology which are exactly the fields I am studying in, working in, and interested in! Moreover, the management options that they gave included public relations (which is what I was aspiring towards when I was in poli sci), marketing (I have a hobby of reading books on marketing), and fashion merchandising (I used to work as an assistant to a fashion merchandiser). Creepy!! Was this a freak occurrence?! Maybe these are very general results, but I think more people should try out this test and report whether or not the career portion seems accurate. It could be a reliable test for career options! Considering that we are all taking a 400 level course, careers are probably on our minds.

All things considered, I think they got the extroversion versus introversion part right, but I don’t think that the rest of the bipolar dimensions, like judging versus perceiving, are really stable personality traits that can be used to classify a person. I feel like some days I let my emotions guide my behavior and other days I am more logical, some days I am more judging and other days more perceiving. It really depends on the situation and/ or how I am feeling. Personally, I think the MBTI is a pretty interesting, fun test and certainly worth a try, however if you are looking for a more reliable test, try out the Big Five test!