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In theory, our personal traits and interests should affect the jobs we pursue and where we thrive the most. This assumption is baked into the Work Psychology theory of “person-environment fit” and it’s an idea that is foundational to services we depend on like vocational guidance and career planning. But one of its key implications has until now been untested: that people who share the same job role will also have similar job interests. Now a surprising new study in the Journal of Vocational Behaviorsuggests that for many jobs, this simply isn’t true.
The Michigan State University research team led by Christopher Nye used the Strong Interest Inventory (that measures interest in six areas: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional) to determine whether people in the same occupation were similar in terms of which was their top-ranked interest.
Among their sample of 67,000 people, across 211 jobs, those in the same occupational role did sometimes show a strong tendency to share the same primary interest – the strongest example being for fine artists, auto mechanics and carpenters, where in each case, 82 per cent of role holders shared the same focus – Artistic for the first and Realistic for the latter two.
But people in other occupations showed much less similarity in interests. For instance, in almost half of the occupations, only the thinnest of majorities tended to share the same interest, meaning that a lot of the time two people in the exact same job often had very different occupational interests.
Could the results be skewed by the sample being stacked with people trapped in jobs that they hate? This isn’t plausible, as the study only involved people who were reasonably satisfied in their role and had worked there at least three years.
It’s possible the variability was exaggerated by only focusing on the top interest. So in a second study using different occupational samples (58 datasets in total), the research team tried a more sophisticated statistical angle that looked for the degree of alignment between a person’s top three interests and the three interests conventionally considered to characterise the job. Nye’s team found that just over half the jobs showed more alignment than you would expect to see at random, but the remaining 45 per cent were the same or less. What this means is that a sizeable minority of occupations are filled by people who aren’t especially interested in the type of work their role is understood to require.
www.bps.org.uk
The Michigan State University research team led by Christopher Nye used the Strong Interest Inventory (that measures interest in six areas: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional) to determine whether people in the same occupation were similar in terms of which was their top-ranked interest.
Among their sample of 67,000 people, across 211 jobs, those in the same occupational role did sometimes show a strong tendency to share the same primary interest – the strongest example being for fine artists, auto mechanics and carpenters, where in each case, 82 per cent of role holders shared the same focus – Artistic for the first and Realistic for the latter two.
But people in other occupations showed much less similarity in interests. For instance, in almost half of the occupations, only the thinnest of majorities tended to share the same interest, meaning that a lot of the time two people in the exact same job often had very different occupational interests.
Could the results be skewed by the sample being stacked with people trapped in jobs that they hate? This isn’t plausible, as the study only involved people who were reasonably satisfied in their role and had worked there at least three years.
It’s possible the variability was exaggerated by only focusing on the top interest. So in a second study using different occupational samples (58 datasets in total), the research team tried a more sophisticated statistical angle that looked for the degree of alignment between a person’s top three interests and the three interests conventionally considered to characterise the job. Nye’s team found that just over half the jobs showed more alignment than you would expect to see at random, but the remaining 45 per cent were the same or less. What this means is that a sizeable minority of occupations are filled by people who aren’t especially interested in the type of work their role is understood to require.
Massive study finds that a sizeable minority of us are in jobs that don’t fit our primary occupational interests | BPS
Do ornithologists flock together? Examining the homogeneity of interests in occupations.
www.bps.org.uk
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