The Question
Personality assessment is widely used in hiring, coaching, and career counselling. Yet surprisingly little published research has systematically mapped how personality actually varies across occupations at scale. Anni and colleagues (2024) addressed this gap directly, profiling 263 occupations across the Big Five personality domains and a range of more specific personality nuances, using one of the largest samples ever assembled for this kind of work.
The Study
The primary sample comprised 68,540 individuals whose self-reported personality data were linked to their occupations. To check the robustness of the findings, the authors cross-validated results using informant ratings from a separate sample of 19,989 individuals, meaning people who knew the participants well rated their personality independently (Anni et al., 2024). This dual-method approach is a meaningful strength: findings that replicate across self-report and informant report are considerably more trustworthy than those resting on a single source.
What Occupations Explain About Personality
After controlling for age and gender, occupational membership accounted for 2 to 7 percent of the variance in Big Five personality domains (Anni et al., 2024). This is a modest but meaningful figure. It means that knowing someone’s occupation tells you something real about their likely personality profile, though the majority of personality variation remains within occupations rather than between them.
The average personality profiles of most occupations were largely intuitive and replicated well across both rating methods and across different sociocultural contexts (Anni et al., 2024). They also tracked meaningfully with the Occupational Information Network’s work style ratings and aligned with the hierarchical structure of the International Standard Classification of Occupations. In other words, the personality profiles were not arbitrary: they made theoretical sense and connected to established occupational frameworks.
The Selectivity Finding
One of the more conceptually interesting results concerns the relationship between personality levels and within-occupation homogeneity. Occupations with higher average levels of personality traits typically linked to better job performance tended to be more homogeneous in those traits (Anni et al., 2024). Jobs whose incumbents perform better, in other words, appear to attract and retain a narrower range of personality profiles, suggesting that higher-performing roles are more selective for personality than lower-performing ones. This has implications for both hiring practice and for understanding how occupational cultures form and sustain themselves over time.
The Value of Nuances
A particularly valuable contribution of the study is its examination of personality nuances: more specific facets sitting below the broad Big Five domains. Several nuances showed occupational differences considerably larger than those found at the domain level, explaining up to 12 percent of variance, and replicated well across rating methods (Anni et al., 2024). This echoes the finding from Anglim and colleagues (2022) on personality and intelligence: broad trait domains capture something real, but the finer-grained picture reveals considerably more.
For practitioners using personality assessment in occupational contexts, this matters. A candidate’s overall Conscientiousness score tells you less than a more specific profile of which aspects of conscientiousness they score high or low on, and how that maps onto the demands and culture of a particular role.
An Interactive Tool
The authors have made their findings publicly accessible through an interactive application allowing users to explore the personality profiles of all 263 occupations directly. This kind of open-access resource is relatively rare in personality research and significantly extends the practical reach of the findings beyond the academic audience.
Why It Matters
The study provides the most comprehensive occupational personality map to date, and its findings are notable for their consistency: intuitive profiles, cross-method replication, alignment with established occupational frameworks, and meaningful connections between personality and occupational selectivity. For anyone involved in recruitment, career development, or occupational counselling, it offers both a useful empirical resource and a reminder that personality profiles at the nuance level carry more signal than the broad trait domains most assessments report.
Reference
Anni, K., Vainik, U., & Mõttus, R. (2024). Personality profiles of 263 occupations. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001249
