Benjamin Todd

This is because they've trained their intuition by playing lots of similar games and built up a sense of what works and what doesn't.

However, gut decision-making is poor when it comes to working out things like how fast a business will grow, who will win a football match, and what grades a student will receive.

Earlier, we also saw that our intuition is poor at working out what will make us happy.

This is all because our untrained gut instinct makes lots of mistakes, and in these situations it's hard to train it to do better.

Career decision making is more like these examples than being a chess grandmaster.

It's hard to train our gut instinct when 1.

The results of our decisions take a long time to arrive, 2.

We have few opportunities to practice, and 3.

The situation keeps changing.

This is exactly the situation with career choices.

We only make a couple of major career decisions in our life.

It takes years to see the results, and the job market keeps changing.

Your gut can still give you clues about the best career.

It can tell you things like, I don't trust this person, or I'm not excited by this project.

But you can't simply go with your gut.

Why career tests also don't work

Many career tests are built on Holland types or something similar.

These tests classify you as one of six interest types, like artistic or enterprising.

Then they recommend careers that match that type.

However, we can see from the table above that Holland type match is only weakly correlated with performance.