Personality Tests
Increasing companies are using personality profiling as a tool to help them recruit and build high achieving teams plus develop their leaders of the future.
For your personal use, these tools can also help you to clarify your own career selection and transition. We’ll look at three of the most well known of these tests: Myers Briggs, Belbin and Thomas International.
One word of caution, these tests will only give you an indication of your preferred way of working. Your own self-knowledge trumps personality tests any time!
Myers Briggs Personality Test
Myers Briggs (MBTI) is a popular test used a lot in big corporations. Its most common uses are for new hire screening, leadership development and team development. It measures your personality traits, or the style with which you do your transferable skills. For example a transferable skill could be “developing relationships” and the personality trait could be “gives one to one attention”, which is your style/way of “developing relationships”. Often on CVS, people will not only list their transferrable skills, but also write down their MBTI preference as well.
There are many tests and articles that will give you some clues, at least about your traits or “type”.
Working out your Myers-Briggs Type
What is your Myers-Briggs Personality Type? Click here to find out.
Belbin Team Role Profiles
Where team-work is critical to business, companies use Belbin to recruit the “right” personality type into team, for succession planning and building high functioning teams. Dr Meredith Belbin defined a Team Role as: “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way". Meredith’s work at Henley Management College identified nine clusters of behaviour, termed Team Roles. Each Team Role has its particular strengths and allowable weaknesses, and each has an important contribution to make to a team. You can complete the Belbin® Self-Perception Inventory and receive - among other reports - a ‘fingerprint’ of your Team Role preferences.
Click here to access the questionnaire.
Thomas International
Thomas’ Personal Profile Analysis enables people to become more aware of their work style. They say that only by improving your self awareness you will have the means to consolidate your working strengths and compensate for your behavioural limitations.
The tests are based around personality, behavioural, aptitude and ability to analyse people’s behavioural style at work, identify their strengths and limitations and help measure their mental agility. They have many applications including recruitment and retention, personal and organisational development, succession planning, coaching, team building, career planning and appraisal.
The assessments cover three main areas:
Personality and behaviour
Aptitude and ability
Job profiling
Other recommended online resources:
Left hand column is a FREE RHETI Sample Test – takes 10 minutes. Click on this and scroll down to take the simple but quality test. Print out results to find areas of strengths.
Written By Fiona Biggins
Career Preparation Expert and Career Coach
