If you are looking to switch careers, a good thing to do is fill out a questionnaire that determines your Myers-Briggs personality type. This summarizes your personality based on 4 dimensions (Extroversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. INtuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judgment vs. Perception).

Once you have your Myers-Briggs personality type, you can match this against jobs where people of that particular type thrive to get a good sense of what type of career you could potentiality flourish in if you are changing industries / fields.

With a huge demand for technology workers and a current shortage of qualified workers, software development and information technology industry remains a field where pay and job security are good. However, people switching in to information technology or computer programming may be concerned that they are not a good fit to perform the tasks required for such jobs.

There have been many studies on what Myers-Briggs type most software developers are, and the conclusions have all been very similar. There is a prevalence of I-T-J types and fewer E-F-P types among software professionals.

But Computing Now magazine earlier this year featured an article about personality types in software development teams with a new spin: Making Sense of Software Development and Personality Types includes research by Luiz Capretz and Faheem Ahmed that matches personality traits to specific roles within a software development team.

This is important as the size of software teams has been growing and formal processes and procedures in software engineering have given individual members of these teams specific roles and responsibilities. There are no longer "just" programmers: there are now System Analysts that gather software requirements from clients, Software Designers that take those requirements and develop a system architecture and solution, Testers that look for errors in the program, and Maintainers who make modifications to already deployed software systems.

The researchers combined academic ideas of the roles of members in a programming team with the stated responsibilities of job postings for specific positions on sites like monster.com and then matched them to the attributes of specific Myers-Briggs types.

Here are the results of the job roles and the personalities types that suit those roles:

• System analysis - Extroversion
• Software design - Intuition, Thinking
• Programming - Introversion, Sensing, Thinking
• Testing - Sensing, Judging
• Maintenance - Sensing, Perceiving

Take a Myers-Briggs personality test and see where you fit in!

Back to Career Center