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You might be more similar to your coworkers than you think. A new massive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal connects the dots between careers and personality, offering job-hunters some insight into finding their dream occupations.
The research, led by Associate Professor Peggy Kern from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology, pulled publicly available information from 128,000 Twitter profiles spanning over 3,500 occupations to show that people in different jobs had very different personalities.
“It’s long been believed that different personalities align better with different jobs,” said Professor Kern. “For example, sales roles might better suit an extraverted individual, whereas a librarian role might better suit an introverted individual.” However, this is the first time such evidence has been measured on a large scale.
“We leave behind digital fingerprints online,” Professor Kern added. “This creates the possibility for a modern approach to matching one’s personality and occupation with an excellent accuracy rate.”
As it turns out, the top GitHub contributors (identified as software developers) were found to rank higher on openness to experience and emotional stability, but were low on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion.
Their near-opposites are tennis players, who—while tend to have high emotional stability as well—are relatively low on openness to experience but are high on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion.
Interestingly, the researchers were able to create clusters of jobs that share the same personality characteristics.
For instance, based on their social media identities, software programmers appear to have similar traits with designers, writers, front-end developers and web developers.
Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoui of the University of Technology Sydney, co-author of the study, explained that the team was able to “successfully recommend an occupation aligned to people’s personality traits with over 70-percent accuracy.”
Dr Rizoui explained that even if the results were wrong, they weren’t completely off, and recommended jobs with comparable skill sets. For example, “[The program] might suggest a poet becomes a fictional writer, not a petrochemical engineer.”
Social media-predicted personality traits and values can help match people to their ideal jobs
“automatically assess user personalities and visually map the personality profiles of different professions”https://t.co/dHKptXy1mf pic.twitter.com/CCtByQmkPN
— Alessandro Vespignani (@alexvespi) December 17, 2019
[via Medical Xpress, images via various sources]
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