What To Look For In New IT Employees
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
When you are interviewing potential new IT employees, are you biased toward a certain personality? A new study by IDG “Introverts vs. Extroverts: Is There an IT Personality?” researched personality types in among IT professionals and sheds light on the perception that they tend to be introverted.
Although there is confusion and some contradiction among prevailing conceptions of what introversion actually is, Susan Cain, author of the book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is quick to point out in the IDG study that the word introvert “is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.”
And while anywhere from a third to a half of an average workplace is populated by introverts, IT has acquired the reputation of being the home of introverts, negatively stereotyped as geeks with absolutely no social skills — and this could be taking a toll on the industry. “One of the biggest disservices to our industry is the cultural stereotype of the super-introverted, socially maladjusted techie nerd. In fact, all kinds of people succeed, but, because of the public misconceptions, too many brilliant, outgoing people … never even consider enrolling in a computing college,” stated one survey respondent.
In the survey, 53 percent of the 465 professionals surveyed responded that they were introverts, while 24 percent said they were ambiverts, 20 percent identified themselves as extroverts, and 3 percent said they didn’t know. Also, 49 percent of introverts responding to the survey said that introverts are inherently better suited to a career in IT, while only 24 percent of ambiverts and 22 percent of extroverts felt the same way. These results suggest a quiet IT confidence for introverts among other introverts, a confidence not shared by others to the same degree.
IDG Connect also turned to Cherie Haynie, who provided an extensive dataset on MBTI types from CCP based on 19,632 IT employees and 465 IT executives, as well as a comparison of non-retail sales managers to provide some perspective. From these datasets, the most frequent personality type among IT employees was ISTJ (19.4 percent), summarized as a personality type that is characterized as “quiet, serious, earning success by thoroughness and dependability, practical, matter-of-fact, realistic, and responsible” — what most people would identify as introverted. The second most common type, ESTJ (13.6 percent), can be summarized as “practical, realistic, matter-of-fact, decisive, quick to move to implement decisions, able to organize projects and people to get things done, and focused on getting results in the most efficient way possible.”
These findings revealed only 54.5 percent of IT professionals are profiled as introverts, with a very significant number testing as ESTJ, despite the focus on introversion in the IT field. Ultimately, the study concludes that there is no typical IT personality, and while the role of IT continues to evolve, IT leaders must increasingly move outside the narrow confines of IT in order to sell the benefits of their department into the wider business.
The very fact that IT is becoming critical in so many arenas is providing a serious opportunity for individuals who can both master the technicalities of IT and communicate that information to the wider business arena. Your business could find combining skills from various personality types will contribute to success.
The study may be downloaded here.