Career Assessment Guide
Introduction
At some point, we’ve all pondered the question, “What career is best for me?” Whether you are just starting in your career journey or looking for a fresh new start, trying to find an answer to this question can be daunting. Luckily, there are a plethora of self-assessments available to assist you.
Let’s be clear, these assessment tools are not a Magic 8 Ball. They can’t see into the future and tell you exactly what your career should be. However, they can help guide you by considering your values, interests, skills, goals, personality traits, and other competencies to help you discover what occupational field and career path best suits you. Assessments can also reveal potential challenges you could face and help you learn about your working style and the type of working environment you’d thrive in. This information should provide a more nuanced and complete picture for self-awareness and career direction.
While some test results may reaffirm what you already know about yourself, they can reveal new information. It may also be helpful to take more than one assessment to confirm and validate results from previous assessments.
Disclaimer: These assessments are for educational and/or personal purposes only and should not be used as diagnostic instruments. You should view the inferences you find within these results with unbiased consideration. Some of these assessment tools may require the help of a qualified professional to ensure the results are interpreted correctly and usefully.
Career exploration and self-understanding are often the most useful yet underutilized aspects of a job search. Lack of clarity in this phase impacts all subsequent stages, including resume, interviews, negotiation, and even lifelong career advancement.
Values and Beliefs
These assessments help you understand what core values and beliefs matter to you. These things don’t usually change, but they can depending on your stage in life.
Core Values Index (FREE)
An online assessment that bypasses personality and behavior to reveal your unchanging motivational drivers and how you contribute to the world around you. The full assessment includes a detailed report and is available for purchase.
Harrington-O’Shea Career Decision-Making System ($)
The award-winning Career Decision-Making System-Revised provides a self-scored assessment that helps you identify your occupational interests, values, and abilities.
Personality and Skills
These assessments help you understand and describe your work setting preferences based on your personality traits. They help you identify specific skills or sets of skills that you haven’t discovered.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Online Careers ($)
This is one of the more widely known assessments. It helps you find career satisfaction by matching your MBTI results to occupations that best fit your unique personality and predicts how likely you’ll be satisfied in those occupations.
Type Finder Personality Test (FREE)
This test is based on the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. It measures your preferences on the four dimensions of personality, plus 23 more detailed facets to personalize your results.
Sokanu (FREE)
Test four different dimensions to find the perfect career match for you. The four distinct areas measure your interests, personality, workplace preferences, career history, and goals. It will match your personality with career models taken from job sites and industry brochures, providing you with the most suitable career match.
Big Five Personality Tests (FREE)
This series of personality tests is based on the Big Five model. The five major dimensions of personality are openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism.
MAPP Test ($)
This test assesses what career path is right for you based on your skills and personality. You will receive five top career matches for free when you take the assessment. You’ll have to pay a one-time fee if you want more comprehensive results.
Holland Code (FREE)
A personality assessment that focuses on career choice; it will group you into one of six occupational categories:
- Realistic: Building, working outdoors, and fixing things
- Investigative: Thinking, researching, and experimenting
- Artistic: Creating, designing, and expressing things
- Social: Helping, teaching, and encouraging
- Enterprising: Persuading, leading, and selling
- Conventional: Organizing, categorizing, and recording
Keirsey Temperament Sorter (FREE)
This assessment divides people into four temperament groups: guarding, idealist, rational, and artisan.
Natural Abilities and Competencies
These provide information on how well your abilities match the demands of your chosen careers.
Self-Directed Search ($)
A career assessment and exploration tool that matches your aspirations, activities, and talents to the career choices and educational opportunities that best fit you.
Career Key Discovery Transitions ($)
A unique classification system that captures the best features of two major research-based systems for organizing occupations: 1) Holland’s personality and interest-based system, and 2) the U.S. Employment Security System’s Guide to Occupational Exploration. This combined system enables you to relate your Holland personality types to occupation groups with similar traits, including interests, aptitudes, temperament, skills, and abilities.
CliftonStrengths (Strengths Finder) ($)
This assessment uncovers your unique rank order of the 34 CliftonStrengths themes. These themes are your talent DNA and explain how you naturally think, feel, and behave. Each theme highlights what you naturally do best and where you might rely on others.
High5 Test (FREE)
This strengths-based personality assessment identifies your top five natural talents from a broader set of strengths. Based on positive psychology, it focuses on what energizes you and helps you apply those strengths to improve performance, relationships, and overall personal and career development.
Career Interests and Personal Goals
These assessments help you identify and understand potential career interest patterns or themes. These can be used to identify careers that match your interests.
Career LiftOff ($)
This tool assesses your career interests and aligns them with the interest profiles of various career fields. Indicate how much you enjoy various activities; your responses will help reveal your career interests. You are likely to be satisfied in a career field if your interest scores are high in that career field.
What Career Is Right for Me? (FREE)
A test to determine what career might be right for you based on four components: skills, interests, style, and values.
CareerFitter (FREE)
This career assessment provides a full career profile, including the following information: careers that fit your personality, interests, skills, work personality, strengths at work, and preferred management style. In addition to learning about your ideal career paths, you will learn what kind of work environment and culture best suits your personality.
O*NET Interest Profiler (FREE)
This tool examines your interests and analyzes how they relate to different fields of work. You will rate different tasks and receive suggestions on which career paths and roles you might enjoy. The test is in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Center for O*NET Development develops it.
Career OneStop Interest Assessment (FREE)
The Interest Assessment matches your interests to careers. You’ll answer 30 quick questions about activities you enjoy to create your interest profile. Then, you’ll see a list of careers that match your profile. From there, you can explore each career, learning about job outlook, average pay, and typical education requirements.
Resources for Recent Grads
For a nominal fee, the University Career Center provides career assessment tools to recent graduates (up to 2 years after graduation). The assessments include the following:
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
- Strong Interest Inventory
- CliftonStrengths
Please visit their website for information on how to pay and register for the assessments.