Does Your Personality Mesh with Your Career - Career Pivot

Does Your Personality Mesh with Your Career - Career Pivot Personality Mesh with Your Career? Your personality is a key factor in finding happiness in your career. Unfortunately, when we make our initial career choices, we may ignore certain key traits or just focus on where we can make the most money. Kinetic Programmer I learned to program computers in high school in the early 1970s. Yes, they had computers back then! I decided to study computer science at the Northwestern University Technological Institute, which is now the McCormick School of Engineering. Solving problems was a challenge Writingprograms in a variety of languages, even assembler code was fun. I would often find myself writing programs for a couple of hours at a time. After Graduation I graduated in the late 1970s and went to work for IBM. My job was to program the latest trendâ€"word processors. I was supposed to sit in my office for eight hours a day with a coding pad and write assembler code. This kind of code is directly translatable into computer instructions (it is very tedious to program and hardly anyone does it anymore). Once I was done writing a significant amount of code, I would sit at my desk and review it. Then my team would get together and perform code reviews. The problem with this is that I am a very high-energy guy where sitting at a desk for more than an hour at a time is painful. Being around people is important. My personality was not suited to just sitting behind the desk and programming for 6-8 hours a day. I spent six years being miserable before I moved into a new role where I no longer wrote programs but supported Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Working with people, solve problems, and working with my hands was much more enjoyable. I was not genuinely happy until I moved into a training function where I taught the latest technologies developed at IBM. That transition took over ten long years. Listen to the most recent episode My personality with the need for high activity was in direct conflict with sitting at a desk for long hours as a computer programmer. My personality did not mesh with my career choice. Structured Anarchist I have a client who has been a finance guy in the non-profit sector for most of his career. He appears to be very structured and orderly. After graduating from college with a liberal arts degree, he became a non-profit executive director. He decided to get an MBA from a prestige business school because they had a non-profit track in their curriculum. When he started the program and was sitting with his advisor, he asked when he would get to take the non-profit courses. After a few perplexing questions, his advisor said: “We should have removed those from the course catalog years ago.” Despite this, he stuck it out and finished his MBA in Finance. He appears to structured and orderly, but he only works well when it is his structure. Creating order out of chaos is his talent, but once he finishes, he gets bored. He then wants another problem to solve. His career progression had been going from one nonprofit organization to another, fixing the problems, then getting bored and leaving. He is now building sales programs but he is not selling.His product is creating sales systems and then training sales partners on how to implement them. He creates the structure and gets to interact with people to implement that structure. Not your typical finance guy. His personality told everyone that he was very orderly, but his need for very little outside structure caused people to place him in positions where there was already a lot of structure…that he could not change. Therefore, he was often unhappy. It was only after he sought out a role that was compatible with his personality, rather waiting than being placed in a role, that he was happy. He became proactive and not reactive. The Challenge Just because you are good at something does not mean you will want to do it for a career. We are often pushed into career paths because we appear to have certain traits. I wrote previously a post titled Are You Your Authentic Self at Work. Just because we have certain talents does not mean you can apply them in the business world. Just ask artists and musicians about applying their talents in the business world. This is why it is important to try a career before you fully commit. Try before you buy! This post is part of a weekly series on the Personal Branding Blog. You can read the original post on the Personal Branding Blog. Marc Miller Like what you just read? Share it with your friends using the buttons above. Like What You Read? Get Career Pivot Insights! Check out the Repurpose Your Career Podcast Do You Need Help With ...