Career assessment tools for students

While the initial results are free, you can pay extra for a more in-depth analysis. Keirsey Temperament Sorter : This test helps you to understand your personality type and discover what type of temperament you have.

Test results suggest a predominant personality type, including Artisan, Guardian, Rational, or Idealist. Your temperament influences career satisfaction, job search strategies, and job performance. A free description of your profile will be provided with an option to purchase the full report.

The results explain to you how each piece relates to your personality type. Users take a question interest inventory that yields a profile of interest tendencies, including six areas: Realistic, Investigative, Social, Enterprising, Conventional, and Artistic. You will see a list of careers related to each cluster, and can then sort those careers into five job zones representing different levels of preparation ranging from little job preparation to extensive preparation.

The site also has extensive career information related to a variety of careers. PathSource : This free career exploration solution helps students and job seekers make better career choices with its free mobile app. Users can produce lists of careers based on personality characteristics and an interest profile.

Lifestyle issues and income expectations are factored into the analysis. An extensive collection of 2, informational interviews on video provides an insider's view from workers in a broad range of professions. A database of careers related to various academic majors helps students to explore the implications of their academic choices.

Users also can search for colleges based on academic offerings, financial aid, average test scores, and other admissions data. While the test is completely free, most of the tools require that you join for a fee. Red Bull Wingfinder : Take a free minute online personality assessment to identify and leverage your strengths in four different areas of your personality, including connections, creativity, thinking, and drive. Wingfinder test takers immediately receive a free page feedback report containing an analysis of their strengths, along with advice, and coaching from Red Bull athletes who have the same strengths.

Skills Matcher : The Department of Labor has developed this resource to enable users to assess the skills they want to incorporate into their careers. You will rate basic skills like reading, writing, speaking, scientific reasoning, and critical thinking, as well as more specialized social, technical, analytical, computer, problem-solving, and resource management skills. Truity : Truity offers a variety of tests you can use to explore your personality career interests.

There's a free short report on the results, and there's a fee to unlock the full report if you want more information. CareerExplorer : CareerExplorer is a free platform for users to assess their interests, personality types, abilities, career values, and preferred work and social environments in order to find matches that will lead to satisfying careers.

The assessment suggests careers after users respond to a series of questions. There's detailed information available on each of the suggested career options. In addition, users can browse occupations by clusters like health and nutrition, law, arts and entertainment, animals, food and drink, politics and law, sports, travel, music, engineering, and science.

While some career aptitude tests are free, others charge for results. Be sure to check before you start the test to see whether you are interested in paying for the advice. Self-Directed Search SDS : The Self-Directed Search SDS is a standard testing option that revolves around categorizing careers into six areas: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. Answer questions about your goals, dreams, activities, and interests, and you'll get a list of the three types of careers that are best matched to you, plus careers that are suited to people with a mix of those characteristics.

Keep in mind that you are required to pay a fee for this test. Career Key : Another career aptitude test that costs a fee is Career Key. This online career assessment tool determines how similar you are to six different personality types.

The results are linked to occupational choices. Crystal Personality Test : Crystal provides free personality tests like Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DISC, Core Value, and Job Fit, so you create a full personality profile to understand how to use your strengths, manage your blind spots, choose your ideal career.

You can also view the personality profiles of your friends, colleagues, and customers. JobQuiz : JobQuiz is a career aptitude test that you can do quickly it only takes about 12 minutes. This gets at the true purpose of an assessment: ignite passion in the person.

You can only ignite this passion in a person when you pair the correct career assessment with the correct environment:. Understanding the context in which you are going to use career assessment is critical to having a successful session.

Career counseling is a process. Generally, a person begins in at state of unawareness and confusion about themselves, the job market or both and the process should bring them to some resolution. The Career Diamond is a well documented framework that illustrates this process:.

At that point, the person is aware that they need to make a career choice or go through career exploration. The first step in the process is making sure the person taking a career assessment knows they are going to be making a career choice or actively exploring the world of work.

The left side of the diamond is called The Exploring Phase. During the exploring phase, the person needs to both explore their self-concept and expand their external awareness of the world of work. The right side is the integration phase during which, the user applies their self-concept and integrates it with their new knowledge of the world of work:. One way to think about this, is to think of how the counselor can help a person complete each step:.

A career assessment should be able to help a person through this journey. An assessment can accomplish different parts of the diamond, ideally with a counselor helping provide additional context and reflection.

Career assessment can help users through the Career Diamond to varying degrees. The best career assessments would help expand self-awareness by helping people form a more clear picture of themselves, expand external awareness through career exploration, apply self-concept by making the logic of career recommendations explicit and integrate external awareness by making clear career recommendations with context. You can assess a lot of different factors of career fit using a career assessment.

The most common include: interests, aptitudes, personality, values, strengths, skills. Interest is a fundamental concept in education, personal development, and vocation because it describes a state of positive engagement, during which the individual is happy to continue working and learning. Interests are important because interest increases both the enjoyment and performance of a task.

The correct career for someone will often include numerous tasks that they are interested in doing. The consensus among researchers is that an interest is the positive phenomenon that occurs when a person engages with pattern structures they enjoy within their environment. For instance, a musician will likely be interested in the pattern structure of musical notes. They are able to elicit positive feelings by interacting with musical notes, playing an instrument, composing music, and other musical activities.

Interests are pattern structures people enjoy interacting with. Interests can be difficult to identify because they are not exactly the activities we enjoy engaging with and because interest as the term is often incorrectly applied to other components of career analysis, most often: type assessments.

In spite of this difficulty, interest is one of the most important components career counselors should seek to identify with a career assessment because of its major impact on both enjoyment and performance on a different task.

It can be difficult to define personality as all of the factors could fall under personality as a category. Personality can be understood as habitual behaviors, cognitions, preferences, or emotional patterns. Different frameworks posit various personality traits. For instance, The Big Five personality assessment , which is favored by psychologists assesses openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The Myers-Briggs personality assessment assesses preferences in how people are energized, perceive information, make decisions, and live their lives. What both the Big Five and The Myers-Briggs personality assessment have in common is their factors assess how people approach situations, handle themselves and make decisions. Because people can be happy and successful with their careers independent of how they approach them, handle themselves or make decisions.

Actually, diversity in all of those categories makes a workplace better. For instance, conventional wisdom would expect extroverted people or those who gain energy by being around others to be better salespeople. In reality, extroverts and introverts are equally effective at sales. This is important to keep in mind because personality is great to increase self-awareness and for reflection but it is not an integral part of a career assessment. Think of it as a great supplement or optional aspect of the process, good to have but not required.

Values are a subset of personality. The idea of the test is not to base your answers on whether you are good at doing the particular activity or whether you think it would make a lot of money. You are simply answering whether you like doing something or not. The test is divided into six pages with around 16 activities on each page. These are based on activities in those six different categories in the following way:. You will also be able to see how you ranked in the other five areas and what jobs are a part of those categories.

You can register at the end of the test in order to save your test results. The Holland Code is great for new graduates or people pondering their career path.

It is a useful tool for understanding what kind of work you enjoy doing and what kind of work appeals to you the most. The My Next Move platform has a career test that examines your interests and analyses how they relate to the different fields of work. The test is done in collaboration with the US Department of Labor. The test will have 60 questions about work activities.

You will need to rank your dislike and like accordingly. The test will take around 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your speed. The purpose is to see what your interests are rather than determining what you are already good at doing. Sokanu has a career test that will test four different dimensions to find the perfect career match for you. The four different areas measure your interests, personality, workplace preferences and your career history and goals.

It will match your personality with career models taken from job sites and industry brochures providing you with the most suited career match. You need to register in order to get access to the career test. You can also sign up with your Facebook account. The registration and the test are free. After completing one component, you will unlock another component. The test will take around 20 minutes to complete, although it is possible to view preliminary results as you keep progressing on the test.

If you are not quite sure whether your current career path is the right one or you want to get a comprehensive idea of what career path might be suitable for you, the test is a good option. It looks at career matching a little differently to the other tests on the list so it can be a good tool to figuring out what kind of jobs actually fit your personality.

If you are in the midst of starting your studies or just about to finish them, entering the workforce, you should use the above tools to find out more about your dream career. You should also test yourself if you are struggling in your current profession, not knowing what you want from life. E-mail is already registered on the site. Please use the Login form or enter another. You entered an incorrect username or password.

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