What Is A Career Assessment?
A career assessment is a method of finding out what your likes and dislikes are in the form of a test. By knowing these likes and dislikes, you can be shown the career direction best suited to you, such as Nursing, Science, Business Administration, and so on. If you are planning to enroll in a university, the career assessment should help you decide what courses would be best for you. If you are already working, then a career assessment could help you find a working environment in which you might be happier.
Doing a simple search for free career assessment will bring up plenty of websites. Some of these sites are very basic. A simple test with few questions will not give you enough insight into what career direction you should take. The more questions you are asked, the better, because you will be given more information about how you relate to different situations. For example - If you prefer dealing with people problems rather than analyzing scientific problems, then you will be more likely suited to a people oriented job than sitting in a lab working on a scientific breakthrough.
How The Career Assessment Works
One such website is www.livecareer.com. Here you are asked to give a few details about yourself. This is to establish what stage of your career you are at – student, currently working, returning to work, and so on. From there, you are asked 100 questions – a sizeable enough number to find out about the person. The career assessment tools are in the form of multiple choice questions that give a better picture of what you like and don’t like, which will help form the direction of your career.
On this particular free career assessment test, a graph of your personality is given – whether you are more suited to the sales side of business or would be happier in health care services. Similar methods are used by all the career assessment websites, but the difference between the good career assessment sites and those of lesser quality is the amount of information you receive at the end of the test.
What Feedback You Get
Live Career gives you a breakdown of jobs that you would be suited for and the earning scales for each. You are given the opportunity to purchase detailed reports of your test. You have a choice of the premium report for $24.95, or the deluxe report for $39.95. These reports may give you more details, but you do not have to purchase them to have an idea of what area suits you, nor should you feel obliged to buy them if you are prepared to take the career assessment test a number of times.
Another website worth looking at is www.questcareer.com. This website is similar to that of www.livecareer.com. You are given a breakdown of interests and motivations. The test is broken down into sections: Interest in job content, temperament for the job, aptitude for the job, how you relate to people, to name a few. With Quest Career, you are also asked to pick 5 jobs, and you are informed how well you would be suited to those jobs.
Taking The Career Assessment More Than Once
Although you could be rather impressed at what you learn about yourself from taking one free career assessment test, it is a good idea to take the test a number of times – over the space of perhaps a week or more. This way, you will have a better picture of the direction your career should take, or what courses you should enroll in. It may also be a good idea, if you are taking the test more than once, to try using a different career assessment website and compare the two. The more you question yourself, the more you will learn about the kind of work you would like to be involved in.
It would be beneficial for students to use career counselor services, if they are available at school, where you will have the option of speaking to a counselor one on one. They can obtain your past test records and see what you excel in – this information would be helpful in choosing specific courses for your chosen career. For those who have been working for a while, you may already know what part of your current career you like and are better at, and what aspects you do not like.
Relying On Free Career Assessments
Although you may get a great deal of information from the free career assessment and career assessment tools, it is best not to totally rely on the results you get. If you are unsure with the answers you get from the assessment, you should perhaps think more about the questions on the test, and be very honest with yourself. Take the test as many times as you think necessary to see a pattern forming that will give you a better idea of the career you should choose.
You may have had dreams and aspirations of being a scientist or a nurse when you were a young child. Unfortunately, as your life goes on, you may find that these hopes are not possible to achieve, or they may not be what you really want at all. While in school, you can benefit from the advice of career guidance personnel, and even later in life there are freelance career guidance specialists. However, you can find answers from the comfort of your own home by taking free career assessments online. These are interesting to do and can help you find the career direction you have been looking for, as well as give you more insight to your personality.
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