The Birkman is Here! The Birkman is Here!

On Friday I met with a career consultant who walked me through the results of my recent Birkman test. For those of you who are not familiar with the Birkman (and, before taking it, I counted myself a member of that club), it's essentially a personality test that determines how you tend to behave. It was created in the 60's by Roger Birkman, a WWII bomber pilot who observed that, even though pilots all flew the same mission, their reactions to a mission were wildly different. He went on to become an operational psychologist and creator of the Birkman Method to try and explain, characterize, and measure these differences.



The test itself involves a long questionnaire:

• Other people are like this, agree-disagree scale
• You're like this, agree-disagree scale
• Which of these jobs appeals to you most, choose

About 75 questions in each section. The method parses this information and spits out your workplace behavioral profile. The profile essentially tells you five things:

• How you tend to behave, in 11 specific areas
• What your needs are, in those 11 areas
• How you tend to react when your needs are not met, in those same 11 areas
• What your interests are
• Based on all of this, what type of job are you most likely to enjoy

It's definitely not a magic formula for bliss-finding, but it is a useful tool for getting an objective view of your own traits. Many organizations use it to screen new hires and build effective teams. And I can see why. This test is really good at identifying, essentially, how you push other people's buttons and how they push yours. (It's similarly good at identifying complementary styles for hyper-effective teams.) For example,

• I tend to prefer to work alone, but really need to feel like I'm an integral part of a larger team. This can make me hard to figure out and can lead others to incorrect conclusions about my behavior. When I don't get the team love, I tend to become overly sensitive to criticism when it's not intended.

Or,

• I tend to be a fairly balanced decision-maker, dealing with day-to-day decisions instantly, but wanting to take more time for big decisions. When I don't get the time for the big decisions, I tend to become very conservative.

Very illuminating to see yourself from the outside this way.

I'm not going to pour out my personality profile on the Internet, but I do think the interests section and the job recommendations that come from all the data are worthy of note in this venue. There are ten interest group and you're rated 1-99 for each of them. Anything over 60 is a strong interest while anything over 85 is considered a "passion". Similarly, anything under 40 is consider low interest, while things under 15 represent things you'd really, really rather not do.

The results surprised me:

First of all, I'm kind of a binomial personality -- there are no "mediums" here. I either love it or hate it. And the things I love most, apparently, are artistic in nature. This doesn't mean I am a great artist or musician or writer -- it simply means that these are what interest me the most. Nor does this mean I am meant to be a novelist. What it means is that I like to create harmony with my customers. I like to create or discover and I like to please my audience with the results, though there is a preference for creation over analysis.

On the other side of the chart, activities that are clerical, outdoorsy, and persuasive (sales-oriented) in nature appall me.

So, what jobs does the Birkman recommend for me? That's tomorrow's topic. Let's just say that Deep Horizon might have gone differently had I been on the job.