What’s Your Type of Career by Donna Dunning Book Review

Do you know which career suits best for you? Or do you find your present career not progressing? Here is a book which can help you in your career whether in finding a suitable one for you or in enhancing your career performance. This book is based on the personality type model of Myers-Briggs which was developed as Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) and has been popular for more than six decades.

The best part of Myers-Briggs personality types model is that it does not try to change people, it just brings more awareness about our preferences and the way we work so that we can utilize our natural inclinations to find our perfect career and achieve growth.

‘What’s your type of career?’ by Donna Dunning is an excellent book about applying Myers-Briggs personality types to our career path and benefit from it.

Originally, around 1920, the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, suggested that there are 3 dimensions to an individual’s behaviour based on their polarities in each dimension. Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, the mother and daughter team elaborated on this concept and added the fourth dimension. The four dimensions in the personality type theory are:

1. Based on how our energy is directed - Extroversion and Introversion
2. Based on how we perceive - Sensing and Intuition
3. How we take decisions or make judgments - Thinking and Feeling
4. Based on our orientation - Judging and Perceiving

The polarities are not the classification of a personality but indicate a natural preference of an individual. For example, one may stay alone and go to deep thinking in order to solve a problem, while some other may prefer an open discussion with others to brainstorm various ideas.

Based the various combination the above polarities, there are 16 personality types. In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), these personality types are further consolidated as eight ways of working based on the way individuals prefer to interact with each other. This is the core of personality types model, which helps us to apply the model to practical situations in life and career.

In the first part of this book, a detailed explanation of various personality types and the eight ways of working is given. Each way of working is given a checklist of personality traits as a self assessment tool, using which, you can figure out your personality type.

One word of caution from the author: The personality types or eight ways of working do not represent your abilities but they represent your natural inclination for a given situation. These should not be used to categorize or label people.

The next eight chapters focus on eight ways of working. Using this personality type model, we can easily understand the preferences of each type, for example, for some one who is naturally inclined to innovate, an individual role as a researcher or scientist would be most suitable. On the other hand, for some one who is naturally inclined to direct and decide, project management might be the right choice. The beauty of this model is, we become aware of our natural inclinations, helping us to choose our careers more easily. How many people take up a wrong career, because it was high paying or some other reason, but then loose motivation or get stagnated because they don’t have the real inclination towards it?

Next follows a discussion on how to utilize t his knowledge in our career. This chapter contains a series of self assessment checklists in various skill areas such as communication, leadership, learning, problem solving, result orientation etc and a check list on occupational skills and values and as well. This chapter helps you to identify your skills and preferences from the perspective of Myers-Briggs personality types. Following this, the task is to do research on possible career options and choose one. There are good tips related to careers for each personality type in this chapter, focussing on choosing a career, not just job.

This book is a must for those who are not sure about their career or who needs more understanding about their career in order shape it well. This book is also extremely useful to managers and leaders who are managing teams, to understand their team much better. The knowledge of personality types will help them in hiring, job assignments and improving their performance.

This book is published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing.