INTELLECTUAL DETECTIVE

You are inherently curious and like to understand the complexities of the world around you. Problem solving is your favorite work-related activity, and you enjoy understanding how things operate, digging into the details, and putting together the puzzle to understand how to resolve issues. You like investigating through research, asking questions, reading, looking at data, or gathering information from a variety of sources to discover answers — and possibly more questions. Your goal might be to improve things or finish a project, but you’re not always interested in the final outcome and may be satisfied coming up with more problems than when you started. You enjoy investigating to get to the heart of an issue and fixing the root cause of a problem rather than finding a shallow quick-fix solution. You’re very curious and determined — you will keep asking questions, researching, and investigating until you find solutions that improve processes and ensure quality.

You might be someone who reads every review of a product before you buy it. You might prefer to read more about an issue before forming an opinion on it. Or you might need to think or research a problem before providing a solution to people. For some people that means that you’re quiet because you think first before responding, but for other people, it means you like to talk and think through solutions verbally. You love to learn new information and are attracted to complex situations that require you to think deeper, pay attention to layers of information, and investigate more details to discover different perspectives on a situation. You’re drawn to entertainment that makes you think deeply like complex movie plots with mysterious endings or podcasts that provide unique perspectives and give you insight into complicated issues.

You like to think, learn, and process information in a pragmatic and logical way based on data and research. You enjoy using technical tools to gather information and would enjoy creating reports to communicate this information to other people. You’re good at seeing patterns and synthesizing information. You focus on quality and good design or engineering that makes things work effectively. You’d rather spend more time on something to make it quality than finish something quicky. You understand the importance of solving problems at the root of the issue and spending time to understand all the information available to create a process or system that has a long-term and permanent solution.

A small percentage of my clients with this personality type consider themselves more curious than other people to the point where they can be disruptive. They describe being the person who always has a lot of questions during meetings and can’t proceed with a project before understanding all of the details. They have to read through all of the legal documents, policies, and procedures before moving forward to the next step and can pick out details to identify problems that need to be examined first before agreeing that something is complete. This can cause conflict in the workplace if leadership or people on a team want to move forward quickly, but this type of personality can also be praised for identifying risks or saving time and money by preventing bigger long-term issues.

There are different types of investigative problem-solving people. Some love researching by reading long, complex documents and others prefer to gather information from a variety of scattered sources and then bring the data all together. Some people with this personality type love data and numbers but others prefer to have conversations and understand more qualitative information. You might consider yourself scientific, mathematical, technical — or even nerdy, but you might not. With this personality type, you could be a dreamer, a social butterfly, or not identify with logic at all — you might simply enjoy research, thinking, and understanding the world.

The stereotype of an investigative problem-solving personality type is an engineer or scientist, but you may or may not identify with these career paths. You can work in any career path as long as it gives you the opportunity to understand problems from a more complex perspective and spend time researching, asking questions, and diving into the details to understand bigger solutions before moving forward with decisions. You get bored easily, so you need a career path that allows you continuous learning and professional growth opportunities. You need time in your workday to understand longer-term projects, examine the bigger picture, and look through the details. You prefer not to be pushed to make decisions quickly based on shallow knowledge of a project.

Are you ready to take the next step in discovering a career path that aligns with your personality and allows you to grow into your potential?