Developed in the 1960s by mother daughter pair, Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myer, the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based on theories by prominent psychologist, Dr Carl Gustav Jung. Each year, more than 1.5 million MBTI personality tests are conducted across different individuals to help them explore various goals.

(Image source: thephilosophicalboy)

It’s usually employed by companies such as Ernst & Young to assess the job-fit of a potential candidate, improve their communications with their colleagues and to enhance team unity in an organization. This is achieved by increasing one’s self-awareness of his or her strengths and weaknesses through personality type identification.

Here, we go through the basics of the MBTI assessment and highlight some careers for selected personalities among the 16 possible MBTI types.

Recommended Reading: Career Dilemma – 5 Needs To Consider Before Saying “I Quit!”

We will look at a brief introduction of the comprehensive personality tool that can help you with a career choice. There are plenty of free online MBTI assessment tests (like this one) although you can get more accurate readings from the real thing itself.

What Does The MBTI Assess?

The MBTI is based on the idea that our personality is made up of 4 dimensions which have 2 opposites (dichotomies). We can be:

• extraverted (E) or introverted (I)
• sensitive (S) or intuitive (N)
• thinking (T) or feeling (F)
• a judgmental (J) or perceptive (P)

The MBTI test requires the test-taker to answer 93 forced-choice questions (choose 1 of 2 possible answers) to determine which of the two sides we lean more towards in each of the 4 aspects.

In the end, each individual receives a unique profile set type out of the 16 possible combinations, such as “Introvert-Sensing-Thinking-Perception” or “Extravert-Intuition-Feeling-Judging”. Our "type" helps us understand our preferences, strengths, weaknesses and compatibility with others and thus can affect the career path we choose to undertake.

Read Also: Survive Office – 7 (More) Tips For Moving Up Corporate Ladder

Breaking Down The Aspects

Let’s take a look at what these aspects mean.

Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)

“Outward-turning” (extraversion) refers to the tendency to be sociable and energized by action and people, while “inward-turning” (introversion) refers to the tendency to be more thoughtful and preferring to have deep conversations with fewer people.

It is a case of either focusing on the internal world of ideas and reflections or to experience life through the external world of behaviour, action, people and things.

Read Also: Public Speaking: How To Nail An Interesting Presentation

Perceiving: Sensing (S) – Intuition (N)

How do we perceive and make sense of the world around us? Sensing people prefer precedents, facts and details. On the other hand, intuitive people love to explore relationships, patterns and imagination.

Being dominant in one area significantly affects how we habitually see things.

Judging: Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)

This part of the personality predisposes us to how we make decisions on a regular basis. Scoring high for thinking (T) means that one is able to stay consistent, logical and objective during the decision-making process while people who prefer feeling (F) will consider the emotions and the needs of other people.

Put simply, thinking people emphasize tasks while feeling people are more into social relationships.

Read Also: Social Lives Online Versus Offline – Finding The Right Balance

Judging (J) – Perceiving (P)

The last dimension of personality involves our preference for either Judging (Thinking – Feeling) or Perceiving (Sensing – Intuition) when it comes to dealing with the outside world (i.e. behaviour, action, people and things).

A judging individual will want things to be settled quickly and will exhibit either thinking or feeling styles in their decision-making process, whereas a perceptive individual will be more open and flexible to views and less interested in coming up with conclusions. He or she is more interested in perceiving the world through either sensing or intuition.

The 16 Personality Types & Career Choices

Upon identification, the individual’s personality profile is presented as four-letter acronyms such as “ISFJ” or “ENTP”. Here is a distribution of MBTI Types (based on U.S. Population in 1996).

(Image Source: Delta Associates)

Everyone falls into one of these combinations, and the resulting personality that arises from their interactions creates the 16 unique profiles we see from the table above.

Read Also: 5 Characteristics “The Employee Of The Century” Has

The following are just a couple of career descriptions and the specific personality types which I believe would fit them. Do check them out after you’re done with the actual MBTI or the online version. If not, try having a look to see which of these descriptions resonate with you.

ISTJ & INTJ – Software Engineers / Computer Programmers

Dealing mostly with codes, software engineers and computer programmers tend to work alone. Therefore, Introverts would probably fit well.

Depending on the nature of their work, they can lean to either sensing or intuition, each with their own benefits. For work involving maintenance and enhancement of software systems, a tendency towards sensing is advantageous since they generally favor working within pre-existing structures or systems and to come up with pracitical solutions.

For those who do more research and developmental projects, an intuitive mind is key as they typically provide the innovations required during the early stages of a fresh project.

They also have to be technically oriented, and stay logical and objective in their work. Individuals who function independently and are adept at regulating their internal emotions are often in demand. This is because they need organized and decisive people who are disciplined enough to see through laborious projects.

Individuals who score high for Judging often desire achievement and strive to seek closure to any projects through comprehensive planning.

ESTP & ISTP – Computer Technical Support Specialists

The important thing for a computer tech support specialist is to have a liking for hands-on experience. They must be able to sense what technical problems are occuring and troubleshoot it in the quickest possible manner. Because the problems they face is typically immediate, what is imperative to them is the here-and-now and how they actually resolve urgent issues.

As most of their workplace problems are solved through their logical and objective diagnoses and analyses, computer tech support specialists are less concerned about their own emotions or other people’s. Even when asking clients questions while investigating the source of the problem, their focus stays on the accurate interpretation of the issue.

For the computer tech support specialist, they just need to maintain their objectivity in their communication. Since there is usually more than one method to troubleshoot an error, computer tech support specialists also have to maintain a Perceiving frame of mind and consider multiple problem causes before coming up with a variety of potential solutions.

ENFP & ENTP – Marketers

Excellent social and communication skills are a must for any marketer as they meet with various individuals within the company on a regular basis and typically engage in persuading existing and potential clients. Hence, people with an extraverted outlook who can make conversations with different types of people are ideal.

As marketers are responsible for forecasting demand, they need to be insightful enough to set their eyes on the future and recognize opportunities for the organization. They’re expected to unleash their creativity and think out-of-the-box when it comes to marketing strategies and advertising. Therefore, individuals would preferably have an intuitive mindset.

In decision making, there are two possible kinds of marketers: one who listens to their emotions and pays attention to the feelings of others, and another that relies on their sense of objectivity and practicality. Both are equally competent.

Marketers as a whole are expected to be highly adaptable to the changing business landscape. They should be flexible with their thinking and habitually keep an open mind.

ESFP & ISFP – Artists

Artists love to observe and interact with the world using their senses and are hence very perceptive to their environment. Such sensory acuteness is a testament as to why they favour hands-on experience.

They prefer to enjoy life as it unfolds instead of leading a structured and routine life. Just as how a painter embraces each and every stroke of his or her brushtip on the canvas.

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Their keen sense of aesthetics and beauty is rooted in their deep self-awareness of their own emotions. It even extends to the feelings of the people they interact with, so much so that artists are capable of picking up the subtlest emotions conveyed through body language.

This inclination towards sensory perceptivity and their heightened awareness of emotions leads them to create expressive art pieces. As artists, they are very creative and innovative individuals who often choose not to conform to societal norms and experiment with new experiences and/or ways of doing things.

ENFJ & INFJ – Designers

Introverted or extraverted designers have their own communication methods when dealing with clients and creative directors to determine the requirements of their end product. More importantly though, designers of any field need to understand the relationships between information and data and connect the dots before they can come up with good designs.

While a graphic designers need to grasp what appeals to the intended audience and effectively deliver the messages that their clients wish to convey, a fashion designer is also expected to be skilled at discerning existing fashion trends and making future fashion predictions.

All in all, they need to see beyond what is already out there and imagine new possibilities and this is done through their intuitive sense. They also need to understand the emotions and needs of their end-users as gives them an edge in their designs.

Designers have to consider the clearly-defined goals involved in different stages of the design process before they can even begin their work. Their work performance is therefore highly dependent on their judgment and decision-making abilities.

INFP – Writers & Editors

A lot of reflection and thinking happens in a writer’s head before they can express themselves adequately with words. To do that, a writer spend time alone with his thoughts and ideas. Without a propensity for introversion, it might be hard for someone to enjoy the writing process.

At the same time, writers tend to be idealistic and forward-looking people. They’re always looking for ways to inspire others with their writing. As abstract thinkers, they’re very interested in what their subconscious mind is telling them.

Read Also: 12 Signs That You Are A Writer At Heart (And 3 Signs You Are Not)

Writers tend to be in touch with their own emotions as they normally write their pieces with the intention of arousing the reader’s emotions. Their great sense of self-awareness of their own feelings help them relate to how others feel.

They would rather not jump into conclusions too quickly, preferring to stay curious and to indulge in their imagination. Since they don’t make decisions hastily, they would rather not work under deadlines and have greater autonomy for their work. Such open-mindedness facilitates their generation of ideas in their mind to help them write better.

The "INFP" profile is notably known as the personality type for many of the greatest writers in the world. Some famous individuals who’ve been said to be INFP are George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe and J.K. Rowling.

Here are the ESTJ, ENTJ, ESFJ, INTP & ISFJ career profiles.

I’m an INTJ, What About You?

Personally, I think that even though the MBTI does speak volumes about our individual tendencies, we are still influenced by our peers, the media and other cultural and social factors. It’s easier for us to pursue careers which are best suited to our temperaments, but only if we actually love the work we do.

Fortunately, we have the conscious choice to do things differently from what our personality dictates.

Read Also: Interview Tips – 5 Things Recruiters Think You Should Know

Just as a leopard never changes its spots, one’s personality may be harder to change but you can work hard to align yourself to the expectations and demands of your dream career, and remind yourself to cultivate the right habits.

Take these words from the ancient Chinese philospher, Lao Tzu, as parting advice:

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

If you have been following our monthly post series on Fresh Resources for Designers and Developers, you can see that every month there are plenty of new tools introduced; the list is likely infinite. Back in 2008, when I was just beginning to learn HTML and CSS, most of these tools had not existed yet.

Today, the Web is exponentially growing. It is also getting more complex than ever before. We need more tools that can help lift some of the weight of website development. So, in this post, we have put together a set of trendy tools that will help in web development.

Hopefully these lists could help introduce you to the right web development tools, particularly for those of you who are just getting started.

Recommended Reading: Web Design: Getting Started With Chrome Developer Tools

1. CSS Pre-processors

CSS is very easy to write. The syntax is straightforward and easy to understand. But as your project grows larger, you may have to manage multiple stylesheets to handle thousands of CSS lines and if you know CSS, you know it becomes mighty hard to maintain in that situation.

This is where CSS Pre-processors become really useful. We have covered CSS-Preprocessors for several times in the past, so I guess you already are quite familiar with them. For those who are new, in a nutshell, CSS Pre-processor allows us to write CSS in programming fashion with Variables and Functions, which then is compiled into browser-compliant CSS format. We can also reuse CSS properties with some special rules such as @extend and @include.

There are a number of CSS Pre-processors: Sass, LESS, Stylus, and Myth.

2. Template Engine

Creating a static HTML page similarly is simple. However, if you have multiple HTML pages to handle in your project, things could get out of hand. Most of these pages may share the same components such as a Header, Sidebar, and Footer.

Read Also: How To Create Custom WordPress Template Tags

If you change something in the Sidebar, should you change it for the Sidebar in the other pages, one by one, or use a Template Engine instead?

Using a Template Engine sounds better for this situation. There are now a number of Template Engines that we can use, such as Kit, Jade, and Handlebars. Each has its own writing conventions. Kit, for instance, comes only with Variables and Import capability which are declared with a simple HTML comment tag, like so.

 // example of importing a seperate template <!-- @include inc/partial --> // this is a variable <!-- @var: The Variable Value --> 

Read Also: A Look Into The Kit Language

Jade and Handlebars come with a lot of robust features to cater to more complex projects. We will discuss them in more detail in a separate post (stay tuned!). The point is that if you want to build a scalable static website, you should take advantages of a Template Engine.

3. Task Runner

The process to build a website is considerably repetitive. Minification, Compilation, Unit Testing, Linting, Concatenating Files and Browser Refreshing, to name a few, are the things that we would most likely do often in projects. Luckily, they can be automated using a Task Runner, such as Grunt and Gulp.

You can tell Grunt to do a set of tasks specified in Gruntfile.js. There are now a plenty of plugins to automate almost anything with Grunt, so you need not write your own Grunt tasks.

Say you want to compile your LESS file into CSS, you can install grunt-contrib-less. In our previous post, we have also utilized Grunt to remove unnecessary modules in jQuery.

If if your project is tiring you out, it is time for you to utilize a Task Runner to streamline your workflow.

4. Synchronized Testing Tool

Here is one inevitable tool if you are building a mobile optimized website. If you have a lot of devices to test your website in, you definitely need Synchronized Testing, which allows you to test your website in multiple devices simultaneously.

Browser reloading as well as the interactions like clicking and scrolling are reflected across all tested devices at the same time, saving you from repetitive action.

There are two tools you can try to do this: A Grunt plugin called BrowserSync, and a GUI application called Ghostlab.

5. Development Toolkit

Development Toolkit puts together a number of tools in one Application. If you are not comfortable with the text-based setting in Grunt, a GUI application would probably be a better tool for you.

Codekit pioneers this kind of application, and includes LESS, Sass, Kit, Jade, Siml, Uglify, Bower, and a lot more on its feature list.

Read Also: What’s New In Codekit 2

Codekit is an OS X-only app. If you are using Windows you can try Prepros, if you are using Linux, there is Koala-app.

Have you read Gulliver’s Travels before? Today, we’re going to make you feel like one of the Lilliputians, with this list of huge, no wait, ridiculously oversized every day outdoor objects. These are things modeled after common every day items – just a lot bigger.

These heavy-duty "models" are the center of attention wherever they lie. Some of these overdone outdoor objects are not just impressive to look at, but also serve some very practical purposes. For example, the giant comb in Virginia, United States works as a bike rack.

So let’s jump right in and let the following 15 ridiculously oversized every day objects blow our minds!

Recommended Reading: 40 Ridiculously Oversized Every Day Objects

The World’s Largest Deckchair by Stuart Murdoch. Located on Bournemouth beach in Great Britain, this giant deckchair is 8.5 meters tall and 5.5 meters wide, which makes it even larger than a double-decker bus! It was constructed using 5,016 egg boxes, and weighs nearly 6 tons.

Giant Light Bulb by Sarah Olaerts. A giant dimmable LED lamp that is shaped like an incandescent light bulb. It is 4.5 feet long and made of polyethylene. It even has a remote control.

Step Inside a Creative Mind by Prodigium. Located in Croatia, this dome is designed to look like the head of a person wearing Ray Ban-inspired glasses. On the inside, it exhibits lots of creative fashion-related works.

Giant Comb Bike Rack by Knowho w Shop LA. Shaped like a giant comb, but works as a bike rack. It weighs more than 400 pounds, and is made of Mangaris and powder-coated steel.

"Bad Dog" by Richard Jackson. Located just outside the Orange County Museum of Art and standing 24 feet tall, this giant urinating dog statue is sure to attract the attention of any passer-by. Bad dog!

Giant Yellow Teddy Bear by Urs Fischer. This giant teddy bear was on display in New York back in 2011. It was made of bronze, weighed 35,000 pounds, and stood 23 feet tall.

Spiral of the Galaxy by Marc Quinn. This giant sea shell sculpture was displayed in the vicinity of Chatsworth House, England as part of the Sotheby’s Beyond Limit’s sculpture exhibition on September 5, 2013.

Guns by David Černý. Czech artist David Černý came up with this installation in an effort to convey the message that violence frequently leads into a deadlock and brings no benefit to anyone.

"Remind" Giant Message in a Bottle by Vibeke Nørgaard Rønsbo. Selected to be part of the "Sculpture by the Sea" exhibition, this is a really romantic and movie-esque sculpture of a bottle containing a beautifully written message.

Large LEGO Sculptures by Access Agency. This huge R2D2 sculpture-cum-gateway is just one of the several large LEGO sculptures created by Access Agency. Also included in the series are Darth Vader and The Smurfs.

Planet by Marc Quinn. Marc Quinn designed this huge sculpture of his then 7 month-old son. Located in Singapore, this sculpture measures more than 10 meters in length and weighs 7 tons.

Pentateuque by Fabien Mérelle. The 5-meter-tall artwork ‘Pentateuque’ brings to life the fantastical and seemingly impossible act of an average man (a cast of the artist himself) balancing a gigantic elephant. It is found in Statue Square, Hong Kong.

Metalmorphosis by David Černý. Located in Charlotte, North Carolina, this is a really cool and unique sculpture as it’s made of sliced steel plate layers that can rotate in different directions. It stands 30 feet tall and weighs 14 tons.

Marilyn Monroe Sculpture by J. Seward Johnson. This is a 26 foot-tall statue of Marilyn Monroe in her iconic pose from a 1955 movie, The Seven Year Itch. Originally located in Chicago, it was later moved to southern California in summer 2012.

Big Rig Jig by Mike Ross. This gravity-defying sculpture came from the idea of turning discarded objects into works of art. It stands 50 feet tall, weighs 25 tons, and most importantly, is made using a couple of repurposed 18-wheeler tanker trucks.

CSS has improved with many features which make web development much more interesting and challenging. One of these features is CSS3 animation effects. Before CSS3, to create an animation you can only work with Javascript. But now you can create it easily with CSS3.

We have walked you through with a good tutorial of creating Bounce Effect with CSS3 previously, and in this post I will introduce to you an awesome library that will make animation creation with CSS3 even easier: Animate.css.

Animate.css is a ready-to-use library collection of CSS3 animation effects. This library supplies you with over 50 different animation effects which work consistently on most all browsers with CSS3 support.

You can then apply the animation on your text, picture, form and so on. There are also many great sites using this librar; Tridiv – the best CSS 3D editor on the web – is one of them.

Getting Started

With Animate.css, all you have to do is to include the appropriate classes with your elements. To get started, firstly include the animate.css file into the head. You can download the complete library from the Github repository page.

By default, Animate.css will animate only once upon the first page load. It will then stay static. To be able to control the animation, we’re going to need a little Javascript. In this matter, we’ll include a jQuery into the project, like so.

 <head> ... <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="css/animate.css"> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js"></script> ... </head> 

HTML Markup

To apply the animation you have to add .animated class to the element you want to animate, along with the animation name like so.

 <div class="option animated wobble">This text will animate.</div> 

That’s it! The animation will only be implemented on the page load, so you may also need to use Javascript to apply the animation upon a event trigger. The .option can also be customized to fit your needs.

Additional CSS Options

The animation we have defined previously will loop only once and upon a predefined duration and delay time as well. If you need more loops or a different duration or delay time, here’s how to customize this.

To let the animation loop multiple times or even infinitely, you can use animation-iteration-count attribute. Make sure to also include applicable vendor prefixes like webkit, moz, etc. To make it infinite, then add infinite as the value.

If you need it to loop only several times, just input the value with the number of loops you want.

 -vendor-animation-iteration-count: infinite | <number>; 

To customize the duration, the appropriate attribute to use is animation-duration; and it’s animation-delay for delay control. The following is a sample option code.

 .option { -webkit-animation-duration: 3s; -webkit-animation-delay: 2s; -webkit-animation-iteration-count: 5; } 

Javascript Control

For more control on the animation state, we need a little help from Javascript. Let’s say we want a text link to trigger an animation upon a click. Firstly, we need to add a reference into the link, like so.

 <div class="demo animated"> <p>This text will animate. <a href="" id="ref">Click to animate!</a></p> </div> 

To use the click function, include the link reference into it.

With Javascript, you can define the animation name. We’ll use an approach by creating an animate function, and naming the animation along with the element class (in the above code, we have added the demo attribute).

And the Javascript code will like the following.

 <script language="javascript"> $(function() { $("#ref").click(function() { animate(".demo", 'bounce'); return false; }); }); function animate(element_ID, animation) { $(element_ID).addClass(animation); var wait = window.setTimeout( function(){ $(element_ID).removeClass(animation)}, 1300 ); } </script> 

Animation effect, indeed, is one of the best ways to make your site more attractive but remember to not overdo it.