Choices workshop - Careers week

By L. Thompson

Careers week was full of great activities and talks to enlighten students as well as parents about opening doors to the future. One of these opportunities was the "Choices" Workshop, which took place on Saturday the 21st September. Before the day of the workshop, all participants had to do an online test to determine their DISC personality type; Dominant, Influential, Stable or Compliant. 

A Dominant personality is a result driven, strong, intense, critical personality. The instructors explained that they can often come off as 'aggressive', but that is just because they are straight-forward. 

An Influential personality is outgoing, spontaneous and social personality. They are very social people and love having conversations, and therefore work well with large groups. 
A Stable person is calm, patient, humble, and passive. They are sociable but take a while to warm up to people. These people usually prefer working in environments that have a constant routine, with not many unexpected or spontaneous challenges 
And lastly, a person with a Compliant personality is analytical and strategic. They work well with graphs and data, and like detailed and precise directions. They generally take their time when working and do not like to be interrupted. 
 
That Saturday, students came to school early in the morning along with their parents to learn about how their DISC identity could potentially help them find a career, fit into diverse job sectors and positions. An important thing to note is that we were not given only one letter as a personality, but instead a mapped out scale of the levels of each one.

We started off by doing a variety of tasks to understand the types of personalities and how different everyone is from each other. One of the activities we did, just as we arrived, was to group ourselves into our birth months, then into zodiac signs. After being split into a group where only people who share a zodiac sign with you were included in, we had to agree on three main personality traits and characteristics that belonged to that specific sign. This was a very interesting task, as most the people who were in our group came up with similar adjectives and had the same characteristics, which made us reflect and begin connecting the activity's aim to how the DISC traits worked. 

Throughout the day, we learned various ways of identifying the personality types and we divided ourselves to be with people with the same personality type as us. This allowed us to work together with people who think similarly, making tasks easier and more efficient. 

We left the workshop with a greater knowledge of optimum careers for each personality, where our 'natural skill sets' would be utilised to benefit us. For instance, a 'compatible' job for Dominant person would be a business manager or CEO, a leadership job, while a job for an Influential person could be a salesperson or jobs that include contact and communication with other people.  

Jobs for Stable people could be a teacher, or therapist, and for Compliant personality types, some jobs are data analysts. 
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Another fascinating thing that was presented were jobs from the future. We were handed a sheet which indicated what present careers would 'disappear' and what new jobs would emerge, due to the demand of technology in the modern world. ​