Your Brain: The Missing Manual

The Personality Fit

You can think of the five factors as one way to take a snapshot of your personality. They won't capture your many quirks (or your dashing good looks), but they will show the outlines of five key personality characteristics.

When you start affixing labels and numbers to something as nebulous as the brain, it's easy to get carried away. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of career planning, which attempts to slot people into specific jobs based on the strengths and quirks of their personalities. As you'll see, career testing is often sold for more than it's worth.

Career Testing

Long loved by high school counselors, the typical career test clarifies absolutely nothing. Career tests are famous for brilliant pronouncements like this: Your nurturing side suggests you'd make a fine doctor, veterinarian, or housewife. Your need for order suggests you'd enjoy life as a judge, accountant, or sanitation worker.

Tip

Career tests aren't all bad. They're great as a brainstorming tool to help you identify positions that could be a good fit, and get you thinking about why certain roles appeal to you. Just don't expect them to unearth your secret dream job.

The problem with mapping personalities to careers is that most careers have room for a range of different roles. Although some professions require extreme personality types (for example, the prospects are dim for introverted break dancers and low-conscientiousness house cleaners), most are surprisingly flexible. For ...