50 Best Jobs for Your Personality

_________________________________________________________ Overview of Personality and Career

(and perhaps an additional adjacent type or types that are also important). You can fi nd one

such assessment in Part II of this book.

Although the RIASEC scheme does a good job of covering the whole world of work, the

symmetrical hexagon shape used to illustrate it may be a little misleading because when you

count the diff erent jobs in our economy and the number of people working in those jobs,

you’ll fi nd that some sectors of the hexagon are much more heavily populated than others.

Here is a breakdown of the 732 occupations in the Department of Labor’s SOC classifi cation

for which we have both RIASEC codes and fi gures for workforce size:

Personality Type Number of Occupations Number of Workers 2006

Realistic 329 47,947,078
Investigative 79 6,503,428
Artistic 32 2,600,124
Social 107 22,554,382
Enterprising 91 28,477,616
Conventional 94 34,370,117

As the United States shifts from a manufacturing economy to an information economy,

employment in the Realistic sector is declining and employment in the Investigative sector is

growing, but a large imbalance is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

! e six sectors are asymmetrical in other ways, too. As you’ll see when you look at the lists

in Part III, Social jobs employ a lot more women than Realistic jobs do. Enterprising jobs

employ a lot more men than do Conventional jobs. Likewise, there are diff erences when you

consider where large numbers of young people and older people work.

! e diff erences get really signifi cant when you look at the amounts of education or training

required by jobs linked to the various personality types. For example, for Realistic and

Conventional jobs the most common entry route is on-the-job training, whereas for

Investigative jobs a college degree is usually needed. John Holland and other researchers

have explained that these diff erences refl ect the diff erent levels of cognitive complexity to be

found in the jobs. Realistic jobs deal mainly with manipulating things physically—moving

them, cleaning them, repairing them, and so forth. Conventional jobs deal mainly with data

at the level of organizing it according to pre-determined patterns—fi ling it, keying it in, and

so forth. Investigative jobs, on the other hand, deal mainly with ideas and solving problems

mentally, so the level of cognitive complexity is high and a college education becomes a

necessity.

You should not be troubled by this lack of symmetry in the RIASEC model (even if you

are an Artistic type). It does not indicate a weakness in the theory. But it does create some

problems for a book like this. Although we have attempted to give equal coverage to each of

the six personality types, you will notice that some of the sets of lists in Part III are not of

equal size. Also, since we identifi ed the “50 Best Artistic Jobs” out of a pool of only 70 jobs