Are you looking to find your career path and feel lost in the woods? You aren’t alone. Did you know that 75-85 percent of college students change their majors before graduating? Did you know the average person changes careers five to seven times before they retire? It’s an expensive life delay that can often be avoided by knowing your interests, attributes, and skills beforehand. How?
Forbes explains the matrix of career path confusion and how it spans from recent graduates and family dynamic shifts to stagnation periods at midlife. The reasoning? In most cases it’s because the person isn’t allowing their personality to guide their career choices.
Personality tests can be the key to helping you claim or reclaim your career path at any point in life.
I Know Me… Why Take A Personality Test?
Shakespeare’s words of “to thine own self be true” couldn’t be more befitting to today’s job seekers. Yes, hard skills are the cornerstone of obtaining a career, but it’s the interpersonal attributes within soft skills that help you find career success, enjoyment, and advancement. These soft skills center around who you are as a person and how you relate to others, which is called your personality, and there’s no better way to identify them than a personality test.
You may think you know yourself. After all, you’re the only one with unlimited access to your every, thought, feeling, and emotion, right? But, knowing yourself has a backstage access point that you’re not always privy to accessing or even admitting exists. Scientific America details 10 things you don’t know about yourself, which highlight how humans often have a distorted view of self, find it difficult to identify unconscious inclinations, overestimate abilities, and practice self-deception.
Personality tests reveal all those facets about yourself that you intentionally or passively overlook.
How Can A Personality Test Offer Career Answers?
Corporate America is more focused on company culture fits than ever. In fact over 20 percent of employers are using personality tests as part of the hiring and career development process.
In other words, employers hire just as much on knowledge and skill as they do you having the right attitude and behaviors to ‘fit’ their business model and mission, existing employees, and those they serve.
Personality tests reveal your emotional intelligence, communication abilities, work style, detail orientation, and personal weaknesses and strengths. This unbiased insight makes it a lot easier to see if your unique modus of operation matches with the attributes demanded within a particular career. For example, you may be attracted to a career in nursing based on the hard skills and pay, but your personality test may reveal that your personality isn’t a match based on your lack of ability to be empathetic, not sympathetic.
A personality test is ultimately about discovering unbiased deductions related to the underlying sources of what makes you think and behave a certain way. Knowing this enables some key processes to take place in your career path, including:
• Matching a career to your interests and passions.
• Knowing how your strengths and weaknesses correspond to the standards and expectations within any given career field.
• Discovering areas to focus on for personal growth and professional development.
• Identifying how you communicate and its efficiency and effectiveness.
• Understanding your work style and how it promotes or detracts from productivity.
• Ability to reflect on results and work on key areas of change or rule out certain careers based on ingrained ideologies.
• Discuss results with career guidance authorities to help tailor your education path to your personality strengths.
Examples Of Personality Tests And What They Tell You
The five most commonly used personality tests include:
1. The Caliper Profile – studies positive/negative personality qualities related to job performance.
2. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – groups how your personality is geared toward either extroversion/introversion, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving, with results falling within one of 16 distinctive personality types.
3. The SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire – narrow assessment for the effect of behaviors on work performance based on relationships with people, thinking style and feelings, and emotions.
4. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) – used in over 200 occupations to evaluate temperament in relation to the requirements within specific roles.
5. The DiSC Behavior Inventory – one of the oldest and most often used testing models; it looks at “Dominant (D),” “Influential (I),” “Steady (S),” and “Compliant (C)” factors to reveal a professional behavioral style and teamwork abilities.
In closing, use these personality tests to fine-tune your career path. If you’re systemically happy, satisfied, and suited regarding your career, life will be so much more balanced and productive.
