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Are Your Clients Looking for a Career Change?

written by kgonzalez

Since I work so closely with the Education Market, I was naturally curious to generate the different reports that are available for students in helping them with the career development process. One of the most recent ones generated for me was the MBTI^® Career Report Form M. Although the title indicates that this may actually be a report most suitable for college and university level students, I found this to be incredibly helpful for myself as a non-student!

The MBTI Career Report matches your preferred personality type with a list of occupational titles that compare with those of your same type who are satisfied in those fields. Although this is a great report for students looking for career choices, the results can also aid in helping your clients make a career change and in increasing job satisfaction. Here is a walk through of the report sections with what I found to be the most useful to share with you during an interpretation with your client:

Summary of Your Myers-Briggs^® (MBTI^®) Assessment Results

As with all reports, this page gives you a brief summary of your type. The table on this page is a great resource to use with a client as a way to verify their preferred type after they have been given their initial interpretation of the MBTI instrument.

How Your Type Affects Your Career Choice

I was given a summary of both Preferred Work Tasks and Preferred Work Environment according to my type. The majority of my own work tasks included helping others, such as “focusing on people and process issues rather than on technical problems”. This section gets the client thinking about a certain occupation they may be considering and how their type may play out in that particular environment. A great online resource to find information on occupations is by visiting the O*NET database (http://online.onetcenter.org).

How Your Type Affects Your Career Exploration

At one point in life or another, the majority of us will be on the search for a new job or career. This section identifies what your strengths are in the career exploration process. You are also given a list of challenges along with suggested strategies. For example, one of my challenges is that I may make decisions on what I think will please others. My dominant Feeling preference sometimes gets in the way as I tend to worry about others around me instead of thinking about how it will affect my goals and their outcome. Therefore, that is what I need to get myself to focus on next time I have a decision to make.

How Your Type Affects Your Career Development

I found this section to be most useful for someone who has been out in the ‘real world’ at their job. As you know, certain aspects of our workplaces are not always ideal for our natural preferences. For example, having a preference for Introversion in a company which expects you to brainstorm ideas out loud during meetings can be hard to get used to. We have to learn to adapt by sometimes using our nonpreferred preferences in order to survive, or at least feel comfortable in our jobs. This section gives you a list of how your style has helped you to develop strengths in different areas. Just as the section above, you are also presented with challenges and suggested strategies for overcoming those.

Job Families and Occupations for [Your Type]

This section gets into the fun part! Here you are presented with three sections. The first lists what’s called a Ranking of Job Families for [Your Type]. Here you are presented with a bar graph that includes 22 broad occupational categories (”job families”), each with specific occupations, and how they rank in popularity with those who share your type. This graph is broken down into Most Attractive, Moderately Attractive and Least Attractive.

The second section lists the Most Popular Occupations for [Your Type]. It is important to note that a client should not take the listed occupations too literally. The tasks and the environment of the occupation are what need to be stressed for the client to gain a better understanding of which job titles may be of most interest to them.

The last section lists the Least Popular Occupations for [Your Type]. Again, it needs to be stressed to a client that the listed occupations need not to be taken too literally. It is important to remember that people with your client’s type do enter these occupations, but not in large numbers as to be classified under a popular occupation for that type.

If you are interested in learning more about this report or sharing it with your clients, check it out here. I hope you found this walk through helpful!