Leadership and Career Tests

Nice to meet you all. I am an ESTP (MBTI test), with strong LS and GM anchors (Career Anchor test), with very high Decisiveness, Resilience, and Straregy Thinking abilities (Career Leader test). These are some of the tests they make us take here in INSEAD in the first few weeks. Based on these scores you should focus on career path that fits, and improve your leadership skills.


Note: Lots of people are reading this blog lately (which is good - keep coming), so the results I have given above are not MY scores. I just picked some arbitrary results.


I won't bore you with the details, but each test is a long set of nerve wrecking, brain sucking questions, designed to sample my patience skills and my cosistency. It reminds me of those newspaper quizes that supposedly do a profound psychological analysis by making you circle the answer that suits you most, then make you sum the scores and provide the results (always hated those).

First of all I don't believe in categorizing people into groups of 8, 16, or 100 categories. The world is not so simple and the models of people brains must be more complicated than that. Just reading the results makes me lough: I fit to at least 3 categories in the MBTI test (which classify you by measuring 4 pairs of characteristics one against the other. And come on - is Judgemental really means "Following schedule"?). I always wondered why people believe in horoscopes: Do they really think that the billions of people in the universe can be divided into only 12 groups, when the commonality is an arbitrary parameter - their birthday? In the same way, I can't believe that companies actually use these profiles when making decisions to hire you. They might as well check your horoscope.

Also, I can retake the test 10 times never to answer the exact same way twice. I mean, there are more than 500 questions in the career leader test. Will I want to have more influence or to earn more benefits? That can change in any given day depending on my mood. And based on questions such as this they derive my career motivations! I admit that when I first read the (10 pages, seriousely) report of the Career Leader exam I was impressed. It actually told stories about myself that I could relate to. But then I got to think about it, and my guess is that if I did the test again, assuming that I cannot remember what I picked the last time, I will get a somewhat different report with stories that I can relate to also. And believe me - the next time I take this test some things will defenitely change! I would like better lifestyle than friends on the job (unlike the last time I took the test - I think).

To summerize (and I know this is not the typical post I put in my blog, but hey - that's my blog and I can write about whatever I want to), the leadership and career fitting tests that we took in the first few weeks may seem very serious, but in my opinion we should be careful when taking them into account.