What is it like to take MBTIonline Careers?
Melissa, MBTI Marketing Manager
What is it like to take MBTIonline Careers?
MBTIonline.com now has a new offering, and it’s called MBTIonline Careers. Basically, they’ve created a tool based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that helps people find their ideal careers. It uses data from over 500,000 people who’ve taken the MBTI and are satisfied in their careers, and mashed it together with a secret algorithm for those looking to start off their careers or possibly switch careers.
Having not known much about this before it came out, I had the opportunity to try MBTIonline Careers and write about the experience. Here’s what you get when you take it.
The assessment part of it, 144 questions, took me about 45 minutes to complete.
Some of the questions I wasn’t sure about, because I could see both answers applying especially when it came to the word choice part. But I tried to go with what I liked more and not think in terms of recent events or work-specific behaviors (for example, I’m a lot more social at work than outside of work, mostly because it makes my job easier).
Having worked for The Myers-Briggs Company for a few years now, I’m 99% sure of my MBTI personality type, so I figured if I just answered the questions the best I could I’d get my type preferences.
After answering all the questions, next was a learning section where you confirm that you understand about the different preferences in the MBTI personality type, and you validate your official MBTI personality type.
For me, my estimated type and my assessment results matched up (both INFJ preferences), so from there I moved on to the careers section.
Sections of MBTIonline Careers before you get to your 300 career matches
In the next part of the tool, there are two tabs at the top. The first tab is called “Your Type + Tips.” Here’s what’s in it:
Your type – Basics about your MBTI personality type. From here you can also download the PDF report about your MBTI type.
Choosing a career – This covered “you’re likely to most enjoy careers that enable you to…”, work environments you feel comfortable in, things you shouldn’t do when choosing a career and tips to “enhance your career exploration.”
Most of the recommendations seemed accurate for me, especially “make a meaningful difference in the lives of others” and “don’t forget to identify the downsides of a career as well as potential upsides.” The latter is something I’d never actually thought of. I’d done pros and cons lists when it comes to switching from job to job, but never considered doing that for a career switch.
Your job search – This part told me about how I likely search for a job, and some of the areas I probably have blindspots in when searching for a job. It also had a good tip for interviewing. It said to provide concrete examples and tangible outcomes in my answers. That seems general, but then when I started to think about how I answer interview questions, most of the answers that I naturally give are more high-level and conceptual, and even the ones that might feel concrete to me probably wouldn’t be concrete to someone who has “ST” preferences, so that alone was a great reminder.
Career development – This part (to me) had some of the most helpful information for me (someone who’s about 12 years post-undergrad and has just started officially managing people). One of the things I liked is that it gave specific examples of how I can work on flexing my personality preferences, aka using my non-dominant preferences.
Arbitrators, mediators, and conciliators, oh my!
The most complete list of career matches I’ve ever gotten.
The second section (tab at the top) is called Your Careers. This is by far the most extensive list of careers matches I’ve gotten through any other career assessment – 300 occupations “generated from hundreds of thousands of data points to predict (my) likelihood of satisfaction.”
Note that in the explanation article about “How do we predict satisfaction”, each occupation has at least 200 people in that sample. Also important to remember this is a percent probability you’ll be satisfied in this career, not the percent satisfaction you will have in this career.
My top career, filtered by satisfaction score, was Agricultural Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary. In that one, MBTIonline Careers calculated a 98% satisfaction score. This means I have a 98% chance of being satisfied or very satisfied in this career. This does NOT mean that I will be 98% satisfied in this career. It’s a small grammatical difference, but important to keep in mind.
When I scrolled further down, it showed me my top 10 careers. These are the careers that the assessment and the company’s data-driven algorithm predict I’ll be most satisfied in. I was curious to see if my current career matched up with my top 10 career suggestions. But I was also interested to see what other career recommendations they had.
Apparently for my personality type, I am 98% likely to be satisfied in a career as a mediator or a nursing instructor. Both of these really surprised me, because a 98% likelihood of career satisfaction seemed very high, and but I’d never considered being a mediator. I had considered nursing at the start of college, because I liked the idea of helping people and I was pretty decent at biology. But I’m also very creative and artistic, and nursing didn’t seem like a profession where creativity was used.
It made me wonder – was there a better (more likely to be satisfying) career choice out there waiting for me?
My total career list included 331 careers, with the highest predicted satisfaction rating at 98% (the two I mentioned above plus Post Secondary Agricultural Instructor) and the lowest at 10% (for me, these included Light Truck Driver (10%), Telemarketer (12%), Food Preparation Worker (17%) and Retail Salesperson (25%). The low end of my career matches made sense to me. I’m pretty sure I said “ew” out loud at a few of them (even though no one was around to hear me).
You can sort your career list by satisfaction score, salary, and alphabetically, which I liked.
Ironically when I sorted for salary, the highest paid career (with a 81% predicted satisfaction score for me) was Psychiatrist, and I majored in psychology in college until my mom convinced me that I’d probably get depressed listening to other people’s problems all day.
All careers also have an “outlook” indicator, where three different icons indicate whether that career has a bright outlook (occupations expected to grow rapidly in the next several years or have a large number of job openings), are part of the Green Economy, or have a less than favorable expected number of job openings in the future. This information comes directly from the US Department of Labor. You could look up this data yourself, but it’s convenient that MBTIonline Careers displays it nicely for you.
You can also filter the careers list by minimum salary (starting at $40k) and by job outlook.
So, where was my current job (marketing manager) in the list?
How satisfied did MBTIonline Careers predict I’d be in my current career?
By sorting alphabetically, I made it to page 21 and found “marketing managers” in the career list.
My current role is in content marketing, but I also manage public relations. The initial description for “marketing manager” read to me much more like a product marketing manager than a content marketing manager, but maybe I’m splitting hairs there. When I clicked into the description (Read More), it did list about 25 potential titles in this field that included things like channel marketing manager, product marketing manager, and more. So, I guess it was meant to be a catch all for lots of types of marketing.
Marketing Manager had a predicted satisfaction score of 77%, and the salary range looked correct for what I’ve heard. Initially I was surprised that my predicted satisfaction score was that low. However, I do a lot more writing and video production than MBTIonline Career’s Marketing Manager job seemed to describe. So, if I had to do ONLY what was described in their occupation, the predicted satisfaction score was pretty darn accurate for me.
Further down the ‘Read More’ for this career, the page included WAY more information than I expected. In addition to what was in the description box on the main page (that listed all the careers), this deep-dive career page included:
- A sample of reported job titles (25+ in the case of Marketing Manager)
- A 2 min. video overview of the occupation
- Common on-the-job activities
- Education level required
- Percentage of respondents who had each type of education
- Knowledge and abilities often required in this job
- Self-selection ratio showing if my type was over- or underrepresented in this occupation
- Related careers (here I found advertising and promotions managers, which I also have done under the marketing umbrella)
- A list of additional sources of information on this career (like the American Marketing Association and the Business Marketing Association)
Overall, as someone who works for The Myers-Briggs Company but hadn’t been part of developing this tool at all, I’m really impressed at the amount of information, the accuracy of the predicted satisfaction and the depth of each career in here. It feels a little like an ocean of possibilities – wide and deep with so many parts I could explore.
And though I’m not looking to change careers anytime soon, the whole experience gave me comfort in knowing that there are so many occupations out there that I could possibly be satisfied in. It felt like every career listed (with a predicted satisfaction score that was above my current occupations predicted satisfaction score) was a potential future opportunity.
Maybe that’s too optimistic? Note to self: reread that development tip in MBTIonline Careers about making a list of cons for the career.
But maybe that’s just my INFJ future-focused introverted Intuition taking over.
Want to check out MBTIonline Careers for yourself? Learn more here.