The personality of a good worker

This article, from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, describes the way that employers use personality tests to screen job candidates. Now, it's a good idea for everyone if a candidate is a good fit for a job and for the organization. I've been in several situations where I had a job that was well-suited for my skills and interests, but where the management or other parts of the corporate culture had very different ways of working.

I also have a lot of skepticism about standardized tests. When I was a kid, my mother took me to Boston for a series of aptitude tests. I learned that I should be an accountant. I also learned that, even though I am right-handed, I have better dexterity with my left hand than with my right. My highest SAT score was in math. That would probably explain my first-semester A in college algebra; we can blame the second-semester F on the 60s.

In this morning's mail, I saw read about a couple of writing jobs with a former company. Of course I'm not ready to go back to work, but it's nice to think about. It's good to be able to read a job description and know what they're talking about it and know that I've done that work in the past. The underlying concepts of technical writing - topic-orientation, structured authoring, single sourcing, internationalization and localization, and concurrent development - haven't fundamentally changed in the last 20-25 years. We have new words, products, and methodologies, but we're still trying to solve the same problems - how do we describe complex products and tasks, do so quickly and well, meeting aggressive release schedules, and, while we're at it, make it easy to produce Korean and French versions at the same time.

Most folks don't get into trouble at jobs because they don't have the knowledge or skills to make it happen. In my experience as an employee and as a manager, troubles usually come from instincts in collision. Aspects of our personality makes us unwilling or unable to do the job that we have in front of us. It comes back to personality. Now, if there just was a way for us to know if our personalities are a good match for a job. Oh, yeah, right.