I’ve told you before how engineers (not ChemE’s) were trained back when I was going to school.  It was clearly a concept of “we will make you equal” development.  The engineer-in-training was honed to be completely compatible with the square box that the professors envisioned for their students.

ChemE’s were a little different- it was never clear if we were chemists who were engineers or engineers who were chemists.   One thing that was clear was that we all would be working in the petrochemical industry.

Um.  That was (at least back in the 1960’s) everyone but me.

Which is probably why when I was in grad school, one professor wanted to know what the heck I was doing there.  Shouldn’t I be at Sloan studying marketing?  (No, you old dinosaur; maybe it was time you simply retired and let us young’uns continue changing the profession…)

But, there clearly is something to this classification.  As has been shown by a new study by four Australian professors- Drs. Margaret Kern (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Paul McCarthy  and Deepanjan Chakrabaty (both of CSIRO and the University of New South Wales), and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu (Sidney University of Technology).

These folks published the results of their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA); Social media-predicted personality traits and values can help match people to their ideal jobs.

The premise of their study was to bolster the belief (not truly scientifically tested or verified) that work is more enjoyable and beneficial when there is congruence between the occupation and the individual.    (The premise?  Our personality makes us more likely to succeed at specific occupations.)

First, I need to define some terms they use throughout the publication- personality, traits, and values. Personality is our bio-psycho-social characteristics, our disposition, our values, our goals, our motivations, and our life narratives.  In particular, this is comprised of our traits and values.

A trait is our consistent process of behaving, thinking, and feelings in various situations.  Our values are those things that are important to us.  Which is based, by and large, by the “Big 5” (John and Srivastava) – the classification of our traits into 5 broad categories- extraversion, agreeability, conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability.  To which the researchers  added the 5 Schwartz basic values– helping others, tradition, obtaining pleasure in one’s life, achieving success, and excitement.

The study also relied upon the US BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) classification of occupations.  The BLS culled the tens of thousands of job titles into 867 categories. Given these parameters, the researchers examined the social media of some 128279 twitter users (across 3513 occupations) to discern if there were definite personalities associated with the professions.

They not only found that to be the case, but they were able to relate which professions have similar characteristics to one another.  Why?  Because if AI or other developments find their way to eliminating a certain profession, it would be easy to determine a parallel (personality match) position that uses the same skills and traits for that now unemployed individual.

Note that this was simply a first stab.  The researhcers plan to refine their model, expanding beyond Twitter as “the” social media determinant.   And, to study the top performers in each field.  (For this initial study, they were only able to do this for computer programmers and tennis players; I look forward to the next go-round.)

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