1.2  Choosing Careers

If you have already done a Myers-Briggs personality assessment as part of your career planning, you probably realize that there's a lot of information in there to digest. Hopefully you have received an overview of your preferences for how you like to operate, where your challenges lie, and maybe even a list of careers that are the best fit for your Myers-Briggs type. If you didn't receive a list of careers, you can find such lists by searching on the Internet for "Myers-Briggs and career choice." Take a good look at these lists. Does anything look familiar? Are there any surprises? Pay close attention, because you have just been given a road map to how you best operate and what type of work makes you the happiest. Take some time to reflect on this information and consider your options before choosing careers. Maybe there's a career on the list that you've never considered or have outright rejected. Ask yourself why that is and give it a second look.

As part of the assessment, you should also receive a list of areas that you may need to improve upon. I suggest that you take a very close look at this list, because these are the characteristics that can trip you up in your career. We all have areas that we need to work on; I don't know one successful person who hasn't had to work to overcome deficits. If you don't start working to improve them now, they can come back to haunt you later. I know a woman who didn't pay attention to detail and neglected to document the work she had done. She did fine in her career for over a decade, but eventually received a promotion to a position in which she had to submit regular reports on her progress. She was incapable of doing this because it just wasn't in her nature to be organized and she didn't recognize that this was an area of improvement for her. She was eventually let go from her job. It's far better to know what your weaknesses are now, and start working to improve them, than to face the consequences later in life.