Personalities for Computing Careers

Software	None
Covers	Psychology, nature of computing industry
Skills Required	Interest in teaching computing, interest in career guidance, ideally some interest in psychology
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

A lot of people study computer science and related disciplines like information systems management or artificial intelligence, with the expectation that it will lead to particular careers. They might or might not be well-suited to the careers that their degrees lead to. Some of them discover that they don't much like programming or the puzzle-solving aspects of computer science. Other people might turn their noses up at computing degree courses, perceiving either the courses themselves or the careers that follow them as boring, when they are actually people who would be well-suited to them. And the abilities and the personality characteristics that fit the work involved in many jobs aren't the ones that go with being happy and doing well in particular degrees. So who ought to do which degrees, and what careers should they choose afterwards?

There are a lot of personality tests out there - many made available via the web - that you can take to get some indication of what sort of person you are. But it's difficult to know what to take seriously, and it's difficult to know what provides useful guidance. (And while many tests may provide useful information, unsophisticated categorizations can grossly overinterpret results, like dividing people taking MBTI-like tests into sixteen personality categories when many people will be very close to the middle on some or all of the dimensions.) So what can you learn about yourself and how useful is it? What tests would be more useful?

The challenge is to investigate (1) what types of thinking and activity are actually involved in programming and the other activities involved in computing degrees and computing-related jobs; (2) how one could test for aptitude and suitability for programming and other computing-related activities; (3) how one could give useful test-based career guidance; and (4) how can computer technology help with this.

Variants

This project could equally well be directed to studying aptitude and suitability for other types of degrees and careers. However, some background knowledge of what they involved would be needed.

Some Career Advice

Anyone looking for a project to do is also likely to be looking for a career. A very interesting and highly readable book on preferences for different types of thinking and how they go with different activites and types of jobs is Thinking Styles by Robert Sternberg. I strongly recommend it.

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