How Career Assessments Can Help With The Pieces Of Your Puzzle
Many career development professionals favor using tools such as the Strong Interest Inventory, the Birkman Method, the DISC and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. These and others like them can aid in the process of career assessing & shifting.
Using a behavioral assessment can be very helpful for validating what you might be already sensing are your strong propensities. They can also cause you to see things creatively by bringing more underlying common threads into focus.
However, I want to caution you to not rely solely on the results of these “tests.” Assessments don’t decide what you should do. They tell you how you will do whatever you choose. They give you additional clues by helping you to recognize your natural tendencies.
The assessment trap you can be tempted to fall into – and I especially find this to be the case with students – is that you see you have an aptitude for engineering, so you become an engineer. Maybe you’ll take that career path and live blissfully and happily ever after. Or maybe it’s 15 years later and you’re deciding that you really never liked being an engineer. And now what next? You can take another assessment, which will very likely tell you that you should be an engineer, but what else? Obviously, taking the suggestions of the assessment literally isn’t always the right approach.
Passion about and enjoyment in what you want to do is critical and needs to come into play somewhere. This is where the career development professional should help you understand how the results of your test fit with the other pieces of your puzzle. For example, let’s say you’ve always been drawn to the idea of helping others when they’re in crisis, but the career profile from the test you just took suggests social worker or paramedic. That’s not quite it for you. Your career coach will help you look at the underlying currents of the whole picture. Maybe being a first responder on the scene of an area where a natural disaster has struck to assist people physically and psychologically as a FEMA case worker is your dream job.
So, by all means, use assessments, but keep your mind open when using them, and, better yet, seek help in understanding how everything fits together in the big picture.
Angela Loëb is an author, speaker and co-owner of Great Occupations. She and her partner, Jay Markunas, help people make successful career transitions through workshops, “pajama learning” webclasses, personalized consulting sessions, as well as through The Job Search Boot Camp Show. Find out more at www.greatoccupations.com.