How can career assessments add value to your career decisions?
While some people feel that career assessments are invaluable, others find them useless. How can you tell if they are right for you? As a career professional, I believe career assessments are valuable tools that can be used to help you create and execute an effective career strategy. However, there’s a catch. In order to be valid, they must be completed, interpreted, and applied correctly. There are no easy answers or a one-stop shop that will reveal your “perfect” career. The following is an overview of different types of career assessments, how they should be completed, and in what way you should utilize the results to make sound career decisions.
You can find many career assessments online with a simple search, or at your college’s career services department. Key assessments measure things such as personality, interests, values, and strengths. A personality-based assessment examines how your personality fits with job duties, occupations, and work environments. At its core are the elements of how you perceive things and then make decisions. The most popular personality-based assessment is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). An interests-based assessment captures your interest in various areas, both what you like and what you don’t like, then provides results that allow you to identify alignment with people in select career fields and occupations. The concept is, if your interests align with people in those fields or occupations, it’s logical to believe you may enjoy doing the same type of work. Most interests-based assessments, including the Strong Interest Inventory, integrate occupational themes developed by psychologist and educator John Holland. There are many variations of values-based assessments, which allow you to identify what is meaningful to you. You can then analyze potential workplaces and occupations to determine if they align with your values. In my experience, individuals that achieve alignment between their cores values and professional lives have a greater chance of long-term career satisfaction due to a strong sense of achieving overall purpose in what they do and how they live their lives. Strengths-based assessments, such as StrengthsFinder, are gaining in popularity. They focus on identifying the strengths an individual possesses in terms of elements such as character or professional skills (just to name a couple of examples), and then integrating those strengths into career decisions. Rather than the traditional approach of compensating for an individual’s deficiencies, a strengths-based approach focuses on building upon strengths and their application to individual work, group work, and management of others.
Assessments ask you to answer questions or respond to statements indicating preferences in order to obtain relevant data used to produce customized results. These items are usually multiple choice, and can be based on a choice of two options or a continuum that captures your degree of affinity to a specific task or element. The important thing to consider is that the participant is providing all of the inputs. The assessments take those inputs and apply them to the appropriate criteria to then produce results. Results of career assessments can vary based on many things such as the point in your life that you’re completing them, or even what kind of day you are having (bad mood, good mood, stressed, relaxed, etc.). When completing an assessment, you should be in a quiet area where you can focus and take your time. I suggest to my clients that they read a question or statement carefully, select an answer, and then move on. Go with your gut! Don’t overthink a question, as first impressions offer the best results.
Most clients I work with find their career assessment results to be logical and accurate, which makes sense since they are responsible for the inputs! It is critical to understand that what you see as a result on the screen or a piece of paper is not a definitive answer or absolute next step. For career assessments to be valid, they must be accurately interpreted and the information should be applied correctly. They are just one piece of the puzzle. I work with clients to understand results and patterns in the findings, and then ways to apply and integrate those results into building a personalized and effective career strategy. They can help you organize information in a way that allows you to make smart choices when it comes to your career decisions. That is how they can be effective! There are many forms of free career assessments on the internet. However, if you want a reliable interpretation and comprehensive application, you should consult a career professional that is experienced in the use of assessments. Credible assessments are backed by professionals and extensive research that confirm their reliability and validity.
As a career professional that is certified in the application of multiple career assessments, I feel my training and expertise allows me to make the most of assessments for my clients. They can be a valuable tool in professional discovery and development as long as you understand how to look beyond face value. That’s where you’ll find critical information that will allow you to make educated and informative career decisions.
