What is your ideal job? New research suggests the subtleties of different occupations could be key to finding the right match.

A new study finds there is benefit not only in identifying the skills and experience in a particular industry, but also being aware of personality traits and values that characterise jobs.

“It’s long been believed that different personalities align better with different jobs,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Peggy Kern of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology.

“For example, sales roles might better suit an extraverted individual, whereas a librarian role might better suit an introverted individual. But studies have been small-scale in nature. Never before has there been such large-scale evidence of the distinctive personality profiles that occur across occupations.”

The research team looked at over 128,000 Twitter users, representing over 3,500 occupations to establish that different occupations tended to have very different personality profiles.

For instance, software programmers and scientists tended to be more open to experience, whereas elite tennis players tended to be more conscientious and agreeable.

Remarkably, many similar jobs were grouped together — based solely on the personality characteristics of users in those roles. For example, one cluster included many different technology jobs such as software programmers, web developers, and computer scientists.

The research used a variety of advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics approaches to create a data-driven 'vocation compass' — a recommendation system that finds the career that is a good fit with different personalities.

The team says they were able to “successfully recommend an occupation aligned to people’s personality traits with over 70 per cent accuracy.”

“Even when the system was wrong it was not too far off, pointing to professions with very similar skill sets,” said Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoui of the University of Technology Sydney.

“For instance, it might suggest a poet becomes a fictional writer, not a petrochemical engineer.”

The study is accessible here.