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Your personality could determine your perfect job, research shows

Have you ever wondered if your personality were the right fit for a job, or if a candidate's matched the job requirements?

Understanding how personality is linked to a job role could help match the right person to an occupation, recent research has shown.

As part of the study, titled Social media-predicted personality traits and values can help match people to their ideal jobs, a team of researchers looked at over 128,000 Twitter users of representing over 3,500 occupations, to establish that different occupations tended to have very different personality profiles.

As a result, for instance, software programmers and scientists were found to be more open to experience, while elite tennis players tended to be more conscientious and agreeable.

Interestingly, many similar jobs were grouped together, based solely on the personality characteristics of the participants in those roles.

Commenting on the findings, lead researcher Associate Professor Peggy Kern of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Positive Psychology said: "It's long been believed that different personalities align better with different jobs. For example, sales roles might better suit an extraverted individual, whereas a librarian role might better suit an introverted individual."

Kern's co-author, Professor Paul X McCarthy of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said finding the perfect job was a lot like finding the perfect mate. "At the moment we have an overly simplified view of careers, with a very small number of visible, high-status jobs as prizes for the hardest-working, best connected and smartest competitors.

"What if instead -- as our new vocation map shows -- the truth was closer to dating, where there are in fact a number of roles ideally suited for everyone?"

Thus, he said, having a better understanding of the personality dimensions linked to different jobs can help find "perfect matches" in candidates.

Photo / 123RF

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