50 Best Jobs for Your Personality

Introduction ___

Of course, information in a database format can be boring and even confusing, so we did

many things to help make the data useful and present it to you in a form that is easy to

understand.

How the Jobs in This Book Were Selected

Here is the procedure we followed to select the jobs we included in this book:

1. We began by creating our own database from the O*NET, the Census Bureau, and other
   sources to include the information that we wanted.! is database covered 949 job titles,
   of which 812 were rated in terms of the six RIASEC personality types.


2. Although the ONET was our source of data on the RIASEC personality types of
   occupations, we decided to base our best jobs lists on the system of job classifi cation
   that the Department of Labor uses to report data for our other sources: the Standard
   Occupational Classifi cation (SOC).! e SOC system collapses several ONET job titles;
   for example, the SOC job Accountants and Auditors combines two ONET jobs, as
   the title indicates. In this example, the two ONET jobs both have the same dominant
   RIASEC personality type, Conventional, so the personality type for Accountants and
   Auditors obviously is Conventional. Some other SOC jobs, however, combine O*NET
   jobs with diff ering RIASEC types, so we calculated the average of the ratings for the
   six RIASEC types to determine which type was dominant for these diverse SOC
   occupations.! us we were able to determine the dominant RIASEC types for 733 SOC
   occupations.


3. We eliminated fi ve jobs for which we lacked important information. (For example, we had
   no job-growth data for Farm Labor Contractors.) We eliminated an additional 14 jobs
   that are expected to employ fewer than 500 workers per year and to shrink rather than
   grow in workforce size. We also removed 51 jobs because they have annual earnings of
   less than $20,920, which means that 75 percent of workers earn more than the workers
   in these jobs.


4. For the remaining 663 occupations, we were able to create six lists of occupations, each
   representing one dominant RIASEC personality type.! e six lists ranged in size from
   285 jobs for the Realistic type to 29 for the Artistic type.


5. Because we wanted to identify 50 best jobs for each personality type, we needed a pool of
   more than 29 jobs for the Artistic type.! erefore, we added to this pool another 41 jobs
   for which Artistic was the highest-rated secondary personality type. As a result, you’ll
   fi nd some jobs on the Artistic job lists that also appear on lists for another RIASEC
   type, such as Political Scientists (which has Investigative as its dominant RIASEC
   type), Training and Development Specialists (Social), or Public Relations Specialists
   (Enterprising).


6. Next, for each of the six RIASEC-based lists, we ranked the jobs three times, based
   on these major criteria: median annual earnings, projected growth through 2016, and
   number of job openings projected per year.