What You Should Know About A Personality Profile Test

The personality profile test, like most tests involving the workings of the psyche, is subjective but nevertheless fascinating. There are a number of occasions or disciplines or fields in which we use the personality profile test, as well. We use a kind of profile when in college, preparing for the workforce and deciding what careers to embark on. We submit ourselves to a kind of personality profile test when we are subject to the battery of tests the military administers. (Did any of you guys have recruiters or the military in general come to your high school and have you take a set of tests? We did. Maybe it was because it was the seventies? Maybe it was a conspiracy to recruit all us slackers? Maybe it was my imagination? No, can’t be the third one, cause I still have, in my wallet, the results card that tells me how well I did on the mechanical aptitude versus the other aptitude sections.) And even in the corporate milieu we may be required to take a personality test of sorts, to get a job, to manage employees, or to go along with this or that seminar event or activity.

The dean of the English department at the community college where I worked kicked down in one of her newsletters a personality profile test that was meant to help us with our teacher/student interpersonal dynamics. The following isn’t the exact test, but is one I found in my library that is quite similar (from a book on work motivation):

This particular personality profile test assesses four personality types—The Pioneer (a.k.a. the choleric persona); The Wheeler Dealer (a.k.a. the sanguine persona); Captain Caution (a.k.a. the phlegmatic worker); and The Systems Thinker (a.k.a. the melancholy personality). The test itself is very loose, giving you the personality characteristics of each of the four types first then having you identify yourself, fellow workers, and reasons you see these traits; it then identifies for you what each type needs to be an effective employee, in general, under stress, and how they help you, the manager.

Another type of personality profile test is one we all at work had fun experimenting with after one of the program coordinators brought it back from a management seminar. This one is a parent personality profile test, used for students seeking answers about careers and themselves, for employees and employers, and likely, even for psychiatric service people: It is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, named after a woman and her daughter who created the test during WWII by basing the elements on Jungian theory/methodology.

The Myers-Briggs doesn’t so much measure as it does identify the participant’s preferences—determining how that person approaches the world, f you will. The results, then, show the person whether he/she leans toward Introversion/Extroversion; Thinking/Feeling; Sensing/Intuition; and/or Judging/Perceiving…in degrees and in combinations, as well. In other words, it is not as much a personality profile TEST as it is a fun, interesting game or quiz that doesn’t get “graded”.