Summary of 10 Career Essentials

Donna Dunning

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Consider your personality type. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you emphasize logic or feelings? Not sure? If you want to improve your work performance and move up in your career, knowing your personality type is crucial, says psychologist Donna Dunning. As the author of this book’s precursor, What’s Your Type of Career?, she has closely examined the impact of personality type on choosing a positive career path and has concluded that personality type continues to affect your professional success even after you’ve found the right job. In this guide, she explores that premise in depth by offering an abbreviated Myers-Briggs personality type test and then explaining how your natural preferences influence your work performance. Optimally, once you know your tendencies and inclinations, you will make choices that suit you and lead to your professional success. To that end, Dunning outlines 10 career-boosting strategies and explains the strengths and weaknesses of eight categories of work preferences in each strategy. getAbstract recommends this informative, highly accessible book to all professionals interested in applying a bit of practical psychology and cognitive science to their career advancement plans.

In this summary, you will learn

How your personality type affects your work performance,
What are the eight general ways in which people approach work and
How to advance your career by adapting 10 basic professional growth strategies to fit your personality.

About the Author

Psychologist Donna Dunning is the author of several career advancement titles, including Introduction to Type and Communication. She is also a trainer, coach and consultant.

Summary

Who Are You?

Trying to get ahead in your career without understanding who you truly are is like striving to reach a destination without a map. Once you identify your personality type and how you prefer to work, learn and interact, you will see a clearer path to achieving your personal and professional goals.

Adopt these 10 fundamental strategies to become more successful and more satisfied with your work:

1. “Ask Yourself for Directions”

Everyone has a unique vision of his or her professional achievements. How you individually define success depends on your interests, talents, principles and disposition, as well as your experiences. Having a crystallized idea of your personality type will help you clarify your work preferences, so you can set career goals based on your natural inclinations. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers expanded upon Carl Jung’s theories about personality type in creating their popular test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). You can take an abbreviated version of this assessment to find out which personality category you fit – or better yet, have a psychology professional administer the full test for...

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