Personality or knowledge?

[Amizon]

So I was having a serious discussion with some friends online tonight and this became the hot topic. To get on in the world career wise and such, which one of these is more important? Is it to have a personality that will see you rise above everyone else and be noticed? Or does the knowledge fit the equation since you have to know certain things to perform a specific job?

Whilst these two are perfectly valid reasons to get ahead in the world, I only feel that personality is the most important factor here. For starters, I don't even believe that knowledge is even considered in a job anymore. Instead, the employers opt for people, whom they know will do the job role very well and not be afraid to take risks. If you're seen as a confident type, then surely you'll get very far with your career? That's why I don't think knowledge is as important as it was years ago. Nowadays, it just seems that personality is on the agenda.

 

[Sytec]

I agree with you, but I believe you need both to progress. If you're the guy who takes risks, but isn't experienced or doesn't have great knowledge, the risks you take could be the wrong ones.

 

[Lebreau]

I really think personality takes it more. If you're extremely knowledgeable in a certain field, but you don't ever do your work because you personality is of a slacker, who's going to get the promotion or whatever first? The hard worker who's not quite as knowledgeable, or you?

Knowledge and personality together will get you pretty far, I suppose, but just alone... well.. not so much. I do think a lot of people are hired based on personality, like Ami said.

Knowledge is all well and good, but if you don't know how to use it.. it's not going to get you very far.

 

[Shu]

It honestly depends on the job. Like for instance in my profession it doesn't take much for a developer to get a job as long as they are knowledgable. Now if you were to talking to a client all day as a business analyst well then of course you need a good mixture of personality and knowledge. I mean you can't go totally without the one or the other, because eventually people will figure out you are a fraud if you are just personable.

It's what makes good liars. You have to have both hand in hand, but Personality definitely takes the cake when it comes to the business side of things.

The technical stuff is for the people with less of a personality and more smarts.

 

[WanderingAesthetic]

I'm gonna second Shu here and say it really depends on the job. If it's something like an engineer or a programmer, you mostly need the knowledge. But, you still need to not have a completely vile personality so that you can get your foot in the door and be hired. Everything else... well, mostly you need to be a good bullshit artist, but you need to have at least a little knowledge to make it plausible.

 

[Donald Trump]

Knowledge.
Being charismatic etc etc is fine and good if you're selling stuff, ie door to door salesperson or in a shop. However management is about a lot more than just being able to get on with people well, it requires a lot of knowledge, I should know, my management textbook has over 500 pages. Personality is great if you're having a drink at a pub with your workmates, but when it comes to work people are going to favour someone who knows what they're doing every single time.

 

[Bambi]

It depends on the job, your personality won't get you through a skilled trade like engineering, but I imagine it would be much more beneficial in retail and shit. I did admin and I'd never done the job before but there was nowt to it, so there, it was my personality that made me stand out. There's no way that would have the same standing on something like nursing either... oh and like Hal mentioned too, sales people would need the gift of the gab and the charisma to get people to buy their shit

It really does depend on the job I think, but I'd be more inclined to swing in the direction of knowledge than personality, you're employed to do a job at the end of the day

 

[Six]

Personality.

Your personality says alot about being good at certain things. If you want to learn new stuff, and gain knowledge about something. You personality makes you good in what you do.

For example, you may have great knowledge of how to handle new born babies, but if you don't have the patience in your personality, you're not really getting anywhere, just because you have the knowledge and know how to do something, it doesn't mean you can do it, because you're not standing firm in your shoes.

Some people just don't have the guts to do something they have the knowledge for.

Personality for sure.

 

[blakstang98]

Well, like Shu said originally, it all depends on the job. I mean, personality makes for more charisma, which in turn can be good in a job like selling cars. People wouldn't be comfortable going to a Physics professor to buy a car because he'll give them the facts and bore them to death in the process. If you're in any form of customer service or entertainment business, then how you act around people is an important aspect.

Now, knowledge is flexible and will always work to your advantage. Personality is a great way to directly or indirectly suck up to the boss and advance your position further. But push comes to shove, the more knowledgable one will make it higher in the long run. It's like the classic jock verses nerd stories you always hear. The jock will always be the more well known more recognizable person, but what is their fate in the long run? I'm not saying jocks are idiots and won't go far in life, but they almost never make it further than the nerd because there is more to life than being popular. I was always a very quiet worker and never had much flair to my personality, or as much as a typical charismatic person would, but my bosses always quietly liked what I had to offer more than the person who was charismatic.

Long story short, knowledge will always win in the long run. It all depends on what you're shooting for, the short term or long term success. What can I say, I always think further ahead than tomorrow.

 

[Lirael]

Personality.

You can't really succeed without the right personality for a certain job. If you want to manage, you need to be focussed, need to have the ability to prioritise, need to have interpersonal skills... If you want to succeed in care, you need to have empathy, patience, and yet you also need to have a balanced approach so that you can deal with traumatic cases without being deeply affected. :/ If you want to teach, you need to be adaptable, approachable, confident. Kids and colleagues need to believe in you. You need to balance authority with friendliness.

There are very few jobs you can do without the correct personality. However, you can get by without knowledge, as long as you are able to understand and interpret the relevant information... With the correct personality, you can also develop on your knowledge as you work.

If you only have knowledge, it's very difficult to settle into a job. it's difficult to work with others, difficult to work for others, and difficult to remain focussed. I don't have the right personality for some jobs, even if I have the right knowledge. I couldn't be a journalist, for example, because I'm not ruthless or confident enough to chase a story, even though I know how I would have to go about it and know how to write. I would never feel comfortable chasing people to get a snippet of information, and would hate to get involved in celeb culture because I believe that celebrities are entitled to privacy; some of the paparazzi are very animalistic about celebrities.

I want to be a teacher. I know that I have the right personality for it, and I'm confident that I can succeed.

I was about to go on to say that there are still things to learn because the requirements for teachers have changed, but this brings me on to another point...

You can learn on the job and will often have to. It's rare that you'll find a job for which you have all of the necessary knowledge. Knowledge can and will be acquired. You'll learn new skills as the structure of your job changes. You'll learn new facts as you fulfil your role, meet more people and talk to others who have been through a relevant experience.

 

[Sepalcure]

I personally feel that you need a healthy dosage of both, particularly if one were to be in a position of management. There's slight variations on how much you need of either two qualities and that depends entirely on the sort of job one has. If I were to be a nursing director like my mother, I would have to be confident, assertive, knowledgeable about the technical facets of managing CNAs and LPNs and RNs as well as making sure the nursing home I work for doesn't run into the ground. It's all good and well if you're charismatic, eloquent, and confident but if you lack the knowledge of your preferred trade or profession then why would I entrust myself to you? Engineers need knowledge as well as some form of a personality backbone to work efficiently in their preferred environments. Similarly as Lirael pointed out if you want to be say, a History teacher (something my boyfriend is working hard to attain as his primary goal) then you would need to be well-spoken and well-read on the subject. It's not enough to be able to instill courage and determination in your students you have to be versatile enough to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, help them with a particular misunderstanding in your assignments, prepare them to succeed, and through your own optimism allow them to grow and improve. You simply can not have one without the other.

Although it's certainly true that a computer programmer for instance gets very little teamwork exposure and mostly works in an isolated state: he/she still needs some semblance of a personality to at least get the job during the interview process. As for needing charisma and high self esteem for plugging in strings of binary code and C++ programming languages into a computer? Not necessary, that obviously requires knowledge. So you need both, in conclusion but the requirements and prerequisites of your particular job dictates just how much you need out of the two. That's my opinion anyway.

 

[Dionysos]

This is interesting.

I’m getting that it is accepted here that knowledge can be gained (school, college, university, or just learning on the job / reading / whatever is needed), but can personality be gained? Are we really doomed to remain what we are forever and have to fit our career around it?

What if your personality is very hard to fit into a specific role? You worked hard at school. You’ve tried various things / volunteer to get experience also, but are ultimately incompetent at a lot of things that you do. If there is nothing that actually is natural for your personality, then what can you do? Give up? Or can you learn a personality? Is it right to? Perhaps not. Is it required? Perhaps so.

They don’t do courses on personality. We’re expected to have our personalities and that is who we are. I wish I’d been naughty at school instead of keeping to myself, since ironically it would have built my character which in turn would round me up and make me more of a person in the eyes of others.

People regarding some people as lacking a personality leads me on to another point I wanted to make. Everyone has a personality, even if it isn’t as outward and expressively poetic (or expressively vulgar, which is probably more likely) as other peoples’ personalities. There are people who talk all day long about things that aren’t that interesting, but other people who don’t say much but have very interesting things to say when unlocked. Does the latter person have no personality? Is there no room for him / her on this Earth? I don’t believe that such people should be punished or repressed, but it does become an extra struggle to fight against. I was always told that it was a complimentary thing to be quieter, not vice versa. Of course, that would be for an earlier time.

Knowledge is important for some roles. You need degrees for some. For others you really need postgraduate qualifications. For others even that is not enough, but you need to have that, experience from seven hundred different locations AND kill all two-thousand of your rivals to get the job. However, personality or person skills is also very important, and to some roles more important (as an example I was told several times by KFC that I was under-qualified, despite having a degree, etc – I probably know more about the history of the chicken than I do about how best to fry and batter chicken – I did not say this to them, of course, but my educational background and lack of chicken-frying background was enough for them to get that). Your degree and knowledge might qualify you for the job, but your personal skills (on top of work experience) would be what would get you the job. Of course, it depends on the climate and how competitive it is at that time and location. No-one wants to have to put up with you while you learn what it is to be human, etc, when other candidates have had vast experience with humans on Earth, how to handle and talk with them, even if behind it all they dislike them. To me, that is more false than someone who does like people but lacks the developed interpersonal skills, though I can understand that interpersonal skills are just that: skills, and important ones at that. Therefore, I guess that they can be learned to an extent, but for some people it must take a lot longer than others. I guess it is adapt or die in that sense.

I've focused on inter-personal skills in personality in this post, mainly because it is by far the most important, I've found. It's what almost everyone is after / assumes that you posses.

Still. I do not think it easy to change a personality, and it becomes tricky having to fight your natural self. They should make that much clearer at school.