How to Plan a Career 3: Holland’s Personality Traits

This continues a series on ensuring you find happiness and satisfaction in your career

Once you discover what you love to do, you need to identify compatible occupational fields. John Holland formulated a set of personality types. The Committee on Scientific Awards wrote “His research shows that personalities seek out and flourish in career environments they fit and that jobs and career environments are classifiable by the personalities that flourish in them”.

You Probably Possess All Six Personality Types

Holland identified six personality types. The acronym RIASEC represents the six types (I use the definitions from the University of Missouri Career Interest Game):

• Realistic (The Do-ers): People who have athletic or mechanical ability, prefer to work with objects, machines, tools, plants, or animals, to be outdoors.
• Investigative (The Thinkers): People who like to observe, learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate or solve problems.
• Artistic (The Creators): People who have artistic, innovating or intuitional abilities and like to work in unstructured situations using their imagination and creativity.
• Social (The Helpers): People who like to work with people to enlighten, inform,help, train, or cure them, or are skilled with words.
• Enterprising (The Persuaders): People who like to work with people, influencing, persuading, performing, leading or managing for organizational goals or economic gain.
• Conventional (The Organizers): People who like to work with data, have clerical or numerical ability, carry out tasks in detail or follow through on others’ instructions.

Most people possess all six types, but emphasize three. For example: some people may combine Realistic, Social, and Enterprising.  RSC would represent their code. Others possess SAI (Social, Artistic, and Investigative).

Several instruments can help you identify your personality types. They include Holland’s Self-Directed Search, The Strong Interest Inventory, Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, and other self-assessment process.

Classify Jobs & Occupations by Personality Types

You can already access classification for more than 15,000 occupations. The University of Missouri Career Game helps you identify occupations based on Holland’s codes. They link back to the Occupational Outlook Handbook so that you can identify occupations that you would enjoy.

Join me on Monday when we discuss how the Occupational Outlook Handbook can help