I was once an ESTJ

I am continuing to dig through my records of psychometric & personality test reports, this one goes back to when I was a Software Engineer of three years, I'd just lost my job through redundancy, Ireland was going through some pretty bad times, and I was faced with a lot of uncertainty: do I return back home to South Africa, find a job in Ireland, or try my hand in the UK?? 

As part of the redundancy package, included a one week intense course on Career Planning, CV/Resume writing, Video Interviews and Personality testing. At the time, this would have been my second experience with personality tests, the first was right after university, where I showed all signs of an analytical, thinking, careful engineer. In the two years since, I had left my home country, settled in a brand new world, got to meet new cultures, and see a different side of software engineering - that it changed my outlook of life and work quite a bit.

I strongly feel that a person is on a path to discovery, despite being born with certain traits, that life and experiences will change a person's outlook (although we're told that our real core tenets are what we born with, and fall back to these by instinct or default), thus I have some reservations with these personality tests, because I just don't like being placed in a box. I prefer to create my own path, and adapt to the situations as needed. However, these tests are interesting, and useful to trigger one to reflect...

So this goes back to 2002, thirteen years ago, when I did the Myers-Briggs profile questionnaire, here's the results of that time:

In 2002, I showed signs of ESTJ

So looking back almost thirteen years ago, it's interesting to note that I remained a Software Engineer for another four years, before breaking out into leadership roles as development project manager, senior project manager, and more recently senior program & technical manager.

However, I am no longer that traditional and conservative, as I'm constantly learning and adapting my processes, style and working tool-set, although I do sometimes fall-back to my own traditions that are known to work, deliver value...

I am still quite the organisational, control freak...everything has it's place. I'm so glad that it's actually a Lean discipline to keep the workspace organised, clean & efficient :-)