Discover your Nursing Personality Type for Career Success
Psychometric testing has been gaining popularity with human resource departments in every industry; discover your nursing personality traits.
It may be helpful to understand your nursing personality type if you’re considering
becoming a travel nurse or are fairly new to the profession. Psychometric
testing has been gaining popularity with human resource departments across the country and in every industry. Future
nurses can learn how their personality may be predisposed to particular specialties. Nurses who have low job
satisfaction can begin to understand that they may be happier in a specialty more suited to their personality and
perceptive abilities.
Psychometric testing for nurses can help determine:
- Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert and in what nursing specialties these traits are most valued.
- How you predominantly perceive the world whether through intuition or sensory-based perception.
- Analytical versus intuitive styles of determining diagnoses and where each style is most valued.
- Whether you have what it takes to succeed in nursing school.
- Whether you have the predominant traits that lead to success in nursing.
Traditionally, recent graduate nurses have been discouraged from choosing a
specialty before gaining sufficient clinical experience. Theoretically, new RNs would tend to gravitate toward
specialties that fit their personality type. But this is starting to change.
The benefits are twofold: 1) RNs will have greater job satisfaction and, 2) hospitals can make better use of their
employee training and development budgets.
The Right Specialty = Nursing Success
In a large-scale study, Kennedy, Curtis, and Waters reviewed RN personality profiles in medical literature according to
clinical specialty from 1965 to 2010 – a 45-year history. They found that nurses who balance their primary personality
character traits to their chosen specialty achieved higher levels of job satisfaction and less stress or burnout.
Three specialty areas received particular focus:
- Emergency room (ER) nurses may be more suited to introverts where task orientation, diligence, independence and autonomy are highly valued. ER nurses tend to score higher on open-mindedness and tolerance to patient lifestyle choices, race and religion. They also scored high on both impulsiveness, confidence and competence which are highly-valued traits in the ER.
- Critical care nurses tend to score higher on leadership, dominance, and independence while scoring low in emotional sensitivity and creativity. Intensive care nurses may be identified as being “thinkers” or taking a logical, objective approach to decision-making rather than an emotional one.
- Oncology and palliative care nurses score high on emotional sensitivity, understanding and compassion. They tend to be more empathic resulting in more compassionate care.
Psychometric testing is not yet widely used in the U.S. nursing profession (it’s gaining traction in Australia and the
UK). However you get there, finding the right specialty can lead to improved job satisfaction, less stress and burnout,
and improved quality of life. For healthcare facilities, it can improve recruitment, scheduling, retention, training,
employee engagement, morale, and patient outcomes.
You may feel that personality tests are sheer bunkum - or that they provide true insight into your career aptitudes, but
either way, in the right circumstances, they can be a bit of fun - like astrology!
Last Modified On: Jun 02, 2020
The next stop on your travel journey awaits.
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