Portfolio Career - Values and Psychometric Test

The next part of the selection process in identifying the best careers to put in to my Portfolio Career, is an exercise that will pull out the values that I have concerning work.

As we grow up we are exposed to many external influences and messages, all of which have an effect on our beliefs, preferences and priorities. These are then formed in to our value systems which uniquely shape our decisions and our perceived happiness. These values are better defined than attitudes and opinions, and more firmly set in who we are.

There are techniques that can work at changing these conditioned values that we all have, and if we need to change a value then Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a fascinating series of techniques to do so. However, even in order to initiate that journey you must first define what your values actually are.

In understanding which values are important to us and which are least important, we can help ourselves to understand what decisions will make us happier.

If I had understood my values ten years ago, then I would certainly not have chosen to go in to an Accountancy career, which goes very little towards my key values.

The exercise that I followed is quite simple. In the book "And What do You Do?" by Barrie Hopson and Katie Ledger, it lists 32 values and asks you to rank them in to five categories; Very important, Important, Quite Important, Of Some Importance, and Not Important At All. The aim is to have no more than eight in any one category, and no less than five.

My most important values are below, ranked again in order of priority:

Communication
Independence
Helping Others
Creative
Status
Money

My least important values that do not matter at all to me are below:

Promotion
Place of Work
Well Known Organisation
Routine
Competition
Precise Work
Physical Challenge

So, in itself, this is a vaguely interesting exercise to help me understand what I knew already inside, but this has articulated it for me. The real purpose of this though is to again act as a directional guide in making the decisions about which roles to chase after eventually. This, in the same hand with the achievements exercise, will provide a steer.

Psychometric Tests

The best personality test that I have ever completed is the Myers-Briggs personality type exercise. There is plenty of information regarding this on the internet, if the reader is interested.

There is repetition here in terms of the purpose of such a test. Many people under value these tests and consider them a waste of time, but this is more an indicator of the type of personality of those people. I personally think that, again, they can give you a great insight in to exactly what type of a person you are and act as a wakeup call. It is uncanny how accurate the description is for my personality type, and this helps to reaffirm the direction that I want to go in.

My personality type is ENFP. Each letter means something, and as mentioned before if you want to you can Google it, but the description and guidance is the important bit.

First thing to note is that this is one of the rarest types, only 2-3% of the population. There is a whole load of information, but a summary is below:

Warm and Enthusiastic
Live in a world of possibilities
Ability to inspire and motivate others
Talk their way in or out of anything
Love life
Broad range of skills and talents, and can turn their hand to most things
Strong sense of values
Importance on being genuine
Great people skills
Need to be liked
Intuitively understand people after a short time
No importance on detailed, maintenance tasks
Can make rash decisions on people that are unfounded, due to the strong sense of intuition
Need to master the skill of completing a task.

Incidentally, I agree with all of this, and some of the explanation behind these headlines really made me think that it had me to a tee. It also goes on to suggest preferred occupations of other people with this type. See below:

Consultant
Psychologist
Entrepreneur
Actor
Teacher
Counselor
Politician/Diplomat
Writer/Journalist
Television Reporter

As you can see this is an interesting mix of roles, but one that really excites me, and there are some in there that I wish I had moved more into years ago.

Anyway, that is for another post. The next time I will be getting into the actual list of potentials that I have come up with, and then I can start chipping away at them.