If you feel that your job isn’t for you, taking the Myers-Briggs test may hold some of the answers

The Guardian

London

Do you make small talk when queuing for the photocopier? During a brainstorming session do you silently sink into your seat, or do you bounce your ideas around the boardroom? And what about your timekeeping? Are you always punctual, or are you supposed to be somewhere else right now?

There are no right or wrong answers. We all have a tendency to be one or the other — to be a lively brainstormer or a quiet timekeeper — just as we are either right-handed or left-handed. But such preferences form the crux of the most widely used psychometric test of its kind: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.

Nowadays, the Myers-Briggs is commonly used by employers, consultants and employees themselves to find out more about what direction their career should be going. “In many companies I’ve worked with, if you didn’t know your Myers-Briggs type, it would be like not knowing your date of birth,” says executive coach and qualified Myers-Briggs practitioner Valerie Wark, who works with major British organisations in both the private and public sectors. “I think it is one of the most potent tests around. Very able people can do lots of things. Whether they should be doing that thing is what Myers-Briggs helps with.”

In 1943, mother-daughter team Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Myers identified 16 different personality types, based on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s theory that we are born with a predisposition for one type.

It takes about half an hour to answer 88 questions, after which an evaluator will feed back your results. Your Myers-Briggs type is made up of four letters, which come from four pairs of opposite personality traits.

Take Extroverts and Introverts (E and I), for example. Do you talk more than you listen? How comfortable are you with being alone? Questions such as these can identify which E or I trait is more dominant. The three other categories are Sensing/ Intuition (S/N), Thinking/ Feeling (T/F) and Judging/ Perceiving (J/P), which may ask questions such as, are you a detail lover or a big-picture person?

Judith Smith is an ENTP (extrovert, with intuitive, thinking and perceiving traits). She switched from health-care management to academia after reassessing her career with the help of Myers-Briggs, among other developmental tools.

Available in 19 different languages worldwide, Myers-Briggs supporters rate its success for a number of reasons, often because the concept is so straightforward. But it is not short of critics. Dr Wendell Williams, managing director of ScientificSelection.com, an occupational consultancy firm in Atlanta, Georgia, says: “There seems to be a cult of people who believe in this thing — like it’s the Holy Grail. It’s a 60-year-old pseudo-scientific kind of tool. Lay people seem like it because it has the look and feel of something scientific.” Although he agrees that Myers-Briggs can identify a few basic differences in people, he has little faith in it, especially because of its poor test/ retest liability.

Dr Rowan Bayne (INFP), reader in counselling at the University of East London’s School of Psychology, wrote a book on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and maintains that there are often very clear relationships between particular types and careers. Artists and counsellors tend to be NFs, whereas judges and CEOs are inclined to be NTs. However, Myers-Briggs is not about “slotting people into square holes,” he says. “In each career there are people who may be the wrong type but are actually contributing to and enjoying the career because they are different.”