Empowering career search and enrichment

Written by Jim Larkin

The best results in any personality or interest inventory will be returned when the “client” has clear instructions on how to approach the questions. This is equally true for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® assessment as it is for the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment. When giving instructions to your students who are sitting down to take either or both assessments it is critical that they know how to approach the questions. With the MBTI assessment, you want to emphasize “preferences”. With the Strong you are, of course, after the students’ interests.


When instructing your students who are taking the MBTI® assessment, emphasize that they are to indicate their PREFERRED behavior when answering the questions. They may find that they typically act one way more often, but given the choice, they may actually PREFER to act more in line with the other answer. Their typical behavior may reflect what they have learned to be the “correct” behavior, but if they truly answer honestly, they may find that they are not acting in a manner that would be more natural or comfortable for them. Another way to approach this is to answer as if no one else is going to see your actions and give you their approval or judgment about that behavior; no friends, parents or teachers are going to tell you whether you did the right thing, only yourself. There are no expectations or “shoulds” included in the answers. There is no “normally” I do this, because the possibility is that they may “normally” be acting outside of their preferred behavior because of an outside expectation.

Next week, I’ll share some insights for the Strong assessment.