Understanding various types of personalities is important if you want to secure a job that you will enjoy.
Module 2 of the Successful Graduate course helps you to identify your employability attributes, which, when combined to make up your distinct personality, will help determine how you’ll react to various workplace situations.
Why are attributes and types of personalities so important? Well here’s how five different kinds of personalities we’ve frequently observed in high-performing teams* might collectively approach a workplace issue – anything from a looming internal deadline to negative media coverage externally:
- Director/Leader – this might be the supervisor of your team. This is the person who keeps their attention on strategy and results, and helps the team to realign with them at critical points.
- Networker/Connector – this might be your business development executive. This is the person who immediately picks up the phone to start managing the situation with external stakeholders, then shares their new intelligence or insights back with the team.
- Idea Generator – this might be your marketing or sales executive. This is the person who gets excited about connecting the situation with information and awareness from a range of sources, and generating brand new ways of working or innovative solutions.
- Thinker/Feeler – this might be the business analyst or creative person in your team. This is the person who seems to sit back initially, but adds value by asking questions like ‘but have you thought about’ in relation to the problem-solving activities of the rest of the team.
- Tactician – this might be a member of your operations team. This is the person who identifies the steps required to action solutions, and can instruct the rest of the team accordingly.
So why is this important in a job-seeking context? Well these are the types of teams you’ll need to be ready to fit into. And when you’re headed into an interview, it’s well worth gaining any insight you can into the actual team you might be joining, so that you can highlight the complementary attributes you can contribute. Can you imagine a whole team of idea generators or thinker/feelers? Nothing would ever get done!
* Note: we’ve created the descriptor for each of the summary personalities above, but links to a range of online tests with standardized descriptors are available in Module 2.
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