Career Personality Test Testing For That Perfect Career?}

Submitted by: Steve Dunnigan

A career personality test. What, careers have personalities now? Actually, its your personality under the microscope. Heres what such a test can do, and what it cant do. The pros and cons of career personality tests.

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Most people are either actively looking for the ideal job, or wondering if such an animal even exists. Some folks are lucky enough to have found the perfect career path and follow it. Other folks are not sure what career path to follow and often bounce from job to job, trying to figure out the right career. Sometimes, it might be a matter of soul searching and passion for a subject, other times a matter of building skills.

Would it surprise you to find that personality is linked very closely to a perfect job or occupation? Indeed. And a so-called career personality test can be a useful tool to find out your work style and type of work interaction according to your personality traits.

How It Works

There are several types of career tests. Most typically, a career personality test will be a short questionnaire designed to highlight basic strengths and weaknesses on your personality that can be applied and related to the job or career sector. By knowing this information, a person can learn how to use this knowledge to advance or select the proper career path. For example, if a person does not feel at ease handling social and public situations, a career in social services might not fit this individual well. Many times, an individual may be oblivious to some career weaknesses, and a career personality test may be very insightful.

Career Personality Tests: The Pros

One beauty of these tests is that theyre short (i.e., fast and easy to complete). Other benefits include:

— These tests are free and can be found online.

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— They measure several areas of your personality – feelings, perception, etc.

— They provide an analysis of the information you have provided by answering the questions.

— Many times, they actually identify specific careers and occupations that provide a good match for your skills and strengths.

Career Tests: The Cons

The first thing to keep in mind is that most people are a mixture of personality traits, and such traits can evolve over time something any one test on a particular day will not be able to pick up on. More potential troubles:

— Some may offer answers too generalized to be of much practical use.

— Multiple-choice questions force the individual to pick an answer, which might not be totally true.

— Other models use a degree of Agree to Disagree scale, according to the provided questions, which may or may not give room to other answers.

— An individual may rely on the results and not look at other possibilities.

— In a way, it labels the individual and his/her personality type.

— Depending on the type of test, individuals that take several tests might end up with confusing/conflicting results.

— Indeed, such tests fail in about 30 percent of the cases; these tests are not fool proof.

While finding the perfect career will usually involve a bit more work that clicking a mouse through a set of online questions, career personality tests can be useful as tools to get some insight and perspective. While they have their limitations, such tests can provide a useful starting point in your quest, and help identify career options that you might not have previously considered.

About the Author: Steve Dunnigan is a freelance writer focusing on career and employment topics. For job seekers in this tough economic market, “a killer resume is a necessity,” he says. The website

TopResumeServices.com

has lined up the Web’s most popular

Professional Resume Writing Services

and ranks them on writing quality, industry certification, customer service, and pricing.

Source:

isnare.com

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