What Types of Jobs Are There for Research Oriented Personalities?

Live for reserach by working in a library.
i Comstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images

Whether you’ve taken the Briggs-Meyers personality test or another questionnaire designed to tell if you’re suited to a certain job, you basically know what you like and don’t like. A research-oriented person, for example, may fall under the investigative or the realistic category in a formal test, but you know whether you like to dig until you find answers or really don’t care about the origin of things. If you really are into research, finding just the right job is one of your first challenges that you should really relish. After all, it requires plenty of research.

Health Care

    Doctors of all kinds diagnose problems. It’s up to the doctors of medicine, chiropractic, dentistry and veterinary medicine to dig and ask questions, look at previous research and compare notes until they arrive at the right diagnoses. When the patient doesn’t get better, it’s back to the research table. Laboratory technicians, medical academics and scientists all collaborate to create research projects involving clinical studies to find the cure to ailments. Whether you’re treating patients in your office with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease or are taking part in massive research projects to find a cure for dementia, you will thrive in the medical field with a research oriented personality.

Libraries

    Librarians are all about helping people do their research and find answers. They love to tackle difficult requests and get as much of a thrill from finding an obscure piece of information as the doctor who eventually finds the cause of a patient’s rash. Librarians not only do research, they organize it on the library shelves in hard copies, and they create master electronic databases of information for patrons to use. Librarians are teachers of research in school libraries and they help businesses to organize and locate vital research in a particular industry, from law to government, and in medical libraries.

Psychology

    Like doctors who dig into the many mysteries of the human body, psychologists delve into the myriad unknowns in the human mind. Behavioral research is a branch of psychology that is ideal for you if you are amazed at why people do the things they do and what it takes to alter that behavior. A research psychologist takes big questions like “why do certain people react to death in different ways?” and develops studies, creates experiments and makes corrections until she discovers some answers. If you’ve always enjoyed a good puzzle, then research psychology may be the ideal research career for you.

Engineering

    The field of engineering is wide open, giving you a huge range of possibilities for researching solutions. Engineers create everything from buildings to tools, aircraft, medical equipment, bridges, roads and landscapes. The first priority for an engineer is to research the problem and then build, design and test solutions. Digging into the vast array of possibilities and coming up with a working product is the goal of engineering and that can suit your personality in any specialty you choose.

the nest

×