Why Your Personality Might Help or Hinder Your Job Prospects

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July 29, 2022 Career

Your personality is one of the biggest determinants when it comes to your career success.

But it’s not always easy knowing how your unique traits and patterns affect your choices and career. You might have a natural tendency towards certain behaviors that could help or hurt you in certain situations.

Understanding how these tendencies impact different aspects of your life can be useful in many ways. Here is why your personality might help or hinder your job prospects.

It could put you in the right place at the right time

Your personality is a big part of your identity and how people see and relate to you. You can’t control some of your traits and how they might affect your career prospects, but it is useful to know how they could play out in various situations. For example, if you’ve always been curious about the world around you, the travel writer or tour guide position might be a great fit for you.

Becoming a lawyer may not be such a great idea if you are known to be contentious or argumentative at times. For such crucial jobs, you must know your personality traits such as judging vs perceiving, thinking vs feeling, and extraversion vs introversion. Knowing what jobs would suit your personality means you can seek jobs that match your strengths and interests.

A simple test can help you figure out whether your personality aligns with collaborative or independent roles. For instance, obtaining certifications for the five behaviors facilitator can equip professionals to build stronger, more cohesive teams by understanding individual traits and group dynamics. Knowing this, you can focus on career paths that make the most of your innate strengths.

It could be a disadvantage

Sometimes, your personality might mean you’re less qualified for certain roles. If you are a very reserved person, it is unlikely that you would make a good salesperson or even an effective manager. A reserved person may have trouble earning the trust of their team and making hard decisions if they aren’t sure they are right.

If your personality means you don’t deal with stress well, the pressure of sales work could be too much for you. Understanding how your personality might put you at a disadvantage in certain situations can help to keep you from pursuing roles that aren’t right for you.

It can make it easier to succeed

Knowing how traits like confidence and resilience play out in your career can also help boost your chances of success in whatever job or line of work you choose. You might be able to see how your personality traits could come into play over time and use this knowledge to build on the parts of yourself that will help you succeed.

For example, if an interview pushes all of your buttons, showing extra confidence could be an easy way to overcome some of those obstacles and land the job. Knowing how optimism, emotional stability and flexibility can impact your career prospects can help give rise to these strengths within yourself when needed most.

Conclusion

Personality significantly influences how well you fit into a workplace culture. This is because different office cultures emphasize certain personality traits to varying degrees. For example, some cultures value independence, self-reliance and autonomy more than others.

As such, people from these cultures are likelier to thrive in an environment that encourages those values. Understanding your personality makes it all easier.