Understanding the hidden personality dimensions of different roles could be the key to matching a person and their ideal occupation, according to new research published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
Background
As reported, the findings of “Social media-predicted personality traits and values can help match people to their ideal jobs” point to the benefit identifying the skills and experience in a particular industry as well as being aware of personality traits and values that characterise jobs.
More importantly, on how these will align with the people.
The lead researcher from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology, Associate Professor Peggy Kern, explained that it has long been believed that different personalities align better with different jobs.
Sales roles, for instance, are better suited for an extroverted individual, whereas a librarian role might better suit an introverted individual.
However, studies have been small-scale in nature. Never before has there been such large-scale evidence of the distinctive personality profiles that occur across occupations.
About the Initiative
The research team looked at more than 128,000 Twitter users, which represented over 3500 occupations in order to establish that different occupations tended to have very different personality profiles.
Software programmers and scientists, for example, tended to be more open to the experience. Elite tennis players, meanwhile, tended to be more conscientious and agreeable.
Many similar jobs were grouped together based solely on the personality characteristics of users in those roles.
One cluster included many different technology jobs such as software programmers, web developers, and computer scientists.
Technology was utilised to create a data-driven ‘vocation compass’, which is a recommendation system that finds a career that is a good fit with personality.
These technologies are a variety of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics approaches.
Results
Co-author Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoui of the University of Technology Sydney shared that they were able to “successfully recommend an occupation aligned to people’s personality traits with over 70% accuracy.”
Even when the system was wrong it was not too far off, pointing to professions with very similar skill sets. For instance, it might suggest a poet becomes a fictional writer, not a petrochemical engineer.
Since work takes up most of the waking hours, many people want an occupation that aligns with who they are as an individual.
Because people use different platforms, they leave behind digital fingerprints online. As such, this creates the possibility for a modern approach to matching one’s personality and occupation with an excellent accuracy rate.
Co-author, Professor Paul X McCarthy of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, described finding the perfect job a lot like finding the perfect mate.
By better understanding the personality dimensions of different jobs, more perfect matches can be found.
The analytic approach potentially provides an alternative for identifying occupations that might interest a person, as opposed to relying upon extensive self-report assessments.
They have created the first, detailed and evidence-based multi-dimensional universe of the personality of careers, which can always be improved and evolved over time.
