The Secret to Happiness at Work? Match Your Job With Your Personality

(SPOT.ph) You landed your dream job and your tasks match perfectly with the things you're good at. It sounds perfect until you realize that you are neither happy nor fulfilled.

For those who are still figuring out their career path or are doubting their chosen fields, researchers in Australia claim to have found the answer to the question: how to be happier at work? Apparently, it's to match your job with your personality.

Also read: Feeling Burned Out? Here Are Signs You Should Probably Quit Your Job

Researchers from the University of New South Wales found that individuals with jobs aligned with their personalities lead to happiness and engagement.

"The alignment of our individual personality and the personality of an occupation is the key to engagement. When there is alignment, we have people who love what they do. And we have the conditions for ‘flow’ to be more likely," researchers wrote in the 2022 study.

How is personality tied to happiness at work?

The study found that like people, jobs too have "personalities", and personality and occupational alignment means that professionals are more likely to be successful at their work, find it satisfying, and be happier provided that other aspects of their lives and relationships are doing well.

"Many people in the same role share similar combinations of personality traits and thus different occupations can be characterized as having their own ‘personality'," researchers said.

Individuals whose personalities were aligned with their jobs were also found to be more engaged in their work which is good news for both employees and companies.

"Matching the personality of occupations to the personalities of individuals offers enormous potential to improve engagement," researchers said.

Also read: Surprise! Filipino Employees Top Stress, Anger, and Sadness Levels in Southeast Asia

What's the right job for each personality?

To match individual personality types with job personalities', the researchers used the Big Five personality framework to explore 30 dimensions of personality across the domains of openness, contentiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.

Using software, researchers scrawled through public domain postings of 128,279 Twitter users across 624 of the most common occupations in Australia and measured linguistic patterns for happiness. They also categorized the users into the five domains based on their social media profiles.

The researchers then matched the personalities of the individuals with others who share the same profession or job to see if their personalities were aligned, and created "tribes" or clusters of occupations that exhibit similar signature personality traits.

Here's what they came up with:

So if you're thinking or doubting whether you're in the right job, now might be the right time to reflect on your personality type as well as your job's.

Also read: Time to Go 'Open to Work': How to Look for a New Job While You're Still Employed