Developing Your Own Professional Elevator Pitch Based on the Five Factor Model of Personality

What is an Elevator Pitch?

Reflection affords the opportunity to consider how our personal and professional experiences, learning and observations shape our thinking and worldview.  It is a process whereby we can learn from our experiences and connect theory with practice.  It can also help us become more aware of our personality and self-identity.

Tell me about yourself…is one of the most frequently asked questions to university students and graduates during networking activities, in interviews, and other events such as social events and family gatherings.  This part of the assessment has been designed to better prepare you for answering that question.  You are required to develop your own unique professional elevator pitch – based on Five Factor Model of Personality (also called the Big-5 model).

What is an Elevator Pitch?  An Elevator Pitch is your brand statement. It will prepare you to take advantage of everyday situations (e.g. social settings, on planes, attending conferences, with friends of the family) where you are asked that all important question (‘tell me about yourself’) and turn the occasion into a networking or employment opportunity.

It is a concise, well-practised, uninterrupted professional message about yourself. It is delivered to someone you have just met (e.g. the CEO of a big organisation) - in the time it would take to ride up an elevator.  You will have two minutes to present your professional elevator pitch to your peers in the scheduled workshop.

Important points to remember for preparing the pitch:

Review the topic of ‘personality in organisations’ and recent research on personality and Big-5 model.  You also need to understand how personality dimensions affect work behaviour and performance.

Take the Big-5 personality test on

Analyse the results and do some self-reflection on ‘who you are as a person’ and ‘how the 5 personality dimensions of Big-5 model’ apply to you.

Think of your personal and professional experience and particular incident(s) that correlate with your personality profile.

Prepare a 2 minute pitch describing yourself as a person in terms of any 3 dimensionsof the Big-5 model. You should show understanding of any 3 dimensions of the model in your pitch and how they apply to you and impact your work behaviour and performance.

Look at the marking rubric for this assessment and it will give you a concrete idea of what you need to cover in your pitch.

The pitch should be professional and able to impress that all important person (e.g. CEO of the organisation) to consider making you a job offer.