I should have gone to Fire Investigator school: The Work Importance Profiler

I took another work-related quiz this past week: the Work Importance Profiler. You can take it yourself here. This kind of survey was once called the Minnesota Importance Questionnaire, but despite what the name may imply, it's not about how folks feel about Minnesota.* The survey determines your values in a work context. The theory is this: you may sacrifice your skills and interest to work at an easy, uninteresting job, but you will rarely sacrifice your values. Those values include who you become as part of your job, what you get, who you get to know, and how others regard you.

Here are my results:

OK, to be fair, weighting values like this may be misleading. Working Conditions may rank below Achievement in this list but I still wouldn't work at a job with a genuinely terrible work environment (let's picture a BSL-4 virology lab without proper ventilation, for example). I do tend to value accomplishment above all else. I would never want a job where I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything.

I'm not sure if it's part of the standard survey, but the values can be converted into career categories. Here are my top 10 matches:

Ah, so I should be an actor! These results don't appear to correlate with those from interest surveys like the Strong so I have to take them with a grain of salt.


*I imagine it would look like this.