What a personality test for work actually measures
A workplace personality test asks how you tend to behave at work: where you get your energy, what you pay attention to, how you make decisions, how you organise your week, how you react when the pressure builds. It doesn't test knowledge and there are no right answers. You describe your preferences, and the test sums them up.
That makes it a self-portrait. It captures how you see yourself on the day you take it, filtered through your mood, your current job and your idea of what you ought to be like. It's useful precisely because it's your view, and limited for exactly the same reason.
Tests come in two broad shapes. Some place you on a set of scales and show how far you lean one way or the other on each. Others group those leanings into a type with a name, which is easier to remember and to talk about. Many do both, and that's the most useful arrangement: the name gives you a shorthand, the scales keep the nuance.
The format varies too. Some questionnaires ask how far you agree with statements about yourself. Others put you in a situation and ask what you'd do. The second kind is harder to game, because it's less obvious which answer sounds best.
What a work personality test can do for you
Taken in the right spirit, a personality test gives you a vocabulary for how you work. That vocabulary earns its keep in three places: with yourself, with the people around you, and in the conversations where you have to explain how you work to someone new.
- Knowing yourself better: putting words on why certain tasks energise you and others wear you out, so you can plan your week around it rather than against it.
- Understanding colleagues: seeing that the person who wants every decision made by Monday isn't being rigid, and the one who keeps reopening the plan isn't being awkward. They're working from a different preference.
- Talking about how you work: at an interview, in an appraisal or when you join a new team, it's much easier to say how you like to receive information, or what helps you do your best work, once you have the words for it.
- Choosing work that suits you: noticing the kind of tasks, pace and setting in which you tend to thrive, and asking about them before you accept a role.
- Easing tension in a team: a shared framework turns 'you're impossible to plan with' into a conversation about two ways of planning, neither of them wrong.
Work personality types: the dimensions that keep coming up
Different tests use different labels, but most workplace questionnaires circle round the same handful of questions. Research-based questionnaires often rest on trait models such as the Big Five, which score you along continuous scales. Others sort you into types. Either way, a well-built test opposes two strengths on each dimension, never a strength and a weakness.
These are the questions you'll meet most often, in one form or another:
- Energy: are you recharged by being around people, or by time on your own? Neither makes you better or worse at teamwork.
- Information: are you won over by what's tried and tested, or drawn to fresh ideas and what might come next?
- Decisions: when a call is tough, do you weigh the hard criteria first, or the effect on the people involved?
- Organisation: do you plan the week ahead and settle things early, or keep your options open and adapt as things unfold?
- Temperament: when the pressure's on, do you keep a cool head, or throw yourself in heart and soul?
The limits: a tendency, never a verdict
The biggest mistake with a personality result is treating it as a label that explains everything. It describes a leaning, measured on one day, from your own answers. You'll behave differently facing a deadline than in a quiet week, and differently in a job you love than in one you're putting up with.
Keep these limits in mind whenever you read a result, yours or anyone else's:
- It shows a tendency, not a rule. You can prefer planning and still improvise well when you have to.
- It doesn't measure skills. Knowing you'd rather work alone says nothing about how good you are at your job, or at working with others when it counts.
- It doesn't measure intelligence, values or potential either.
- It's only as good as your self-awareness. Everyone has blind spots, and a test built on your own answers can't see past them.
- It can shift. A new role, a new team or simply the passing of time can move your answers, especially on the scales where you sit near the middle.
- It's no excuse. 'That's just my type' shouldn't close a conversation about how you work with other people.
- A type isn't a box. Two people with the same profile can work in very different ways.
When an employer asks you to take one
Personality questionnaires turn up in UK recruitment, including on many graduate schemes, usually alongside interviews and other assessments. The CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, advises that test results should never be the sole basis for a selection decision, and the companies that publish these questionnaires generally say the same.
If you're asked to complete one, a few things help:
- Answer honestly. Trying to guess the ideal candidate tends to produce an inconsistent profile, and if it works, you land in a role that doesn't suit you.
- Read each question properly, and think about how you actually behave at work, not at home or on your very best day.
- It's perfectly reasonable to ask what the questionnaire is for, who'll see the results and how much weight they carry.
- If you have a disability or a condition that makes the format hard going, ask for reasonable adjustments. Under the Equality Act, employers have a duty to make them for disabled candidates.
- Ask for feedback on your results. Some employers offer it as standard, and it's useful whatever the outcome.
- Your results are personal data, so under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of what's held about you.
- And if you're the one bringing a test into a team, make it optional, share results only with consent, and use them to understand each other, never to sort people or decide who gets which project.
How to read your result
When the result arrives, resist reading only the name at the top. The detail underneath is where the useful information lives.
- Look at the scales, not just the label. A strong lean and a near tie can end up with the same name.
- Pay attention to the middle. If you sit close to it on a dimension, you probably switch depending on the situation, and that's a strength in its own right.
- Test it against real situations. For each point, think of a moment at work that bears it out, and one that doesn't.
- Keep what's useful and leave the rest. A description is a starting point, not a script.
- Look at what wears you out. It's often more useful to know than what you're good at, because it tells you what to protect in your week.
- Talk it through with someone who knows how you work. They'll tell you quickly which parts ring true.
- Take it again after a change of job or team, and look at what's moved.
Why it's worth pairing with what your colleagues say
A personality test tells you how you see yourself. The people you work with see something else: how you actually come across in a meeting, what you're like when a project goes wrong, what you bring that you've long since stopped noticing. Neither view is complete on its own.
Setting the two side by side is where it gets interesting. Sometimes they match, and that's reassuring. Sometimes a colleague praises something the test never mentioned, a patience or a knack for clearing the way, that you'd never have put on a list yourself. And sometimes they point to something you'd rather not see, which is useful too.
That second view can come from a conversation, an appraisal, or recommendations written by colleagues, managers and clients. Written recommendations have one clear advantage: they describe what you actually did, with examples, in someone else's words. Anyone reading a personality profile has to take your word for it. Anyone reading what your former colleagues wrote doesn't.
The Take Your Skills workplace personality test
Take Your Skills has its own personality test, written for work. Rather than asking how far you agree with statements about yourself, it puts you in everyday work situations, from a team moving floors to a busy chat thread, and offers two reactions that both make sense. You pick the one that's more like you, then say by how much. There's no middle option, so you do have to lean one way.
Your result names one of sixteen team pillars, profiles with names of their own, such as the Builder, the Connector or the Fixer, each describing a way of contributing to a team. Underneath, every dimension is shown as a percentage between two opposite qualities, with its facets in detail, and a result close to the middle is marked as a mixed profile. Each pillar has its own page on how it tends to work day to day, the work it thrives on, what wears it out and who it works best with.
The result then sits on your Take Your Skills profile, right next to the recommendations written by people who've worked with you, so the two views can be read together.
In practice:
- It's free. You'll need a Take Your Skills profile, and you sign in with a code sent to your email address, so there's no password to remember.
- Your answers are saved on your device as you go, so you can pick up where you left off.
- Your result appears as soon as you've finished.
- It shows on your profile, and a switch on your result page lets you make it private. You can also retake the test or delete your result whenever you like.
- People in your network who've taken the test show up with their pillar, which gives you a shared language for how you each like to work.
- Like any personality test, it describes tendencies, not skills. That's what the recommendations are for.