It isn’t difficult these days to find various occupational aptitude tests on the Internet to help you figure out what you might do for a career. Typically people who think about using occupational tests are people starting out their career who aren’t quite sure what they want to do as well as experienced people who think that they need a career change because they’re bored with what they’re doing or just feel like there is something else out there that’s more interesting than what they’re doing currently.
The first such test I ever remember doing was way back in grade 8 in the early 1980s when we completed a test that was supposed to help us find occupations that would suit our personality. While I don’t remember the types of questions that were asked, I remember that my results showed that according to this test, I’d be good at being a baker, a counsellor or a teacher from memory. Interesting….
I also recall in university when we did various tests to learn more about ourselves and our personalities. One particular test I always remember is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is a well-known personality assessment tool. I’ve completed this test 3 times in my life and the results are always fairly similar.
Employers can also use a number of different personality tests to learn more about you especially if they are interested to hire a certain type of person. An organization looking to hire a hunter-type salesperson for example would want to find an outgoing, possibly aggressive (in a business sense of course), hunter-type person that would match what they deem to be the “ideal” personality type for such a position.
The thing to keep in mind with any test that you do is to take the results with a grain of salt and to not necessarily let them lead you down a path you’re not interested in. Instead, think about the results and what it was about your answers that would lead one to believe that these positions would suit your personality.
In the case of the career assessment test I did back in grade 8, I don’t think I thought much about the results beyond for a few days after I got the test results back. In the case of the Myers-Briggs tests that I did, I was older when I did these tests and was more aware about my own personality and if anything, the results verified what I already knew about myself. While I didn’t let the results steer me in one career direction or another, I did think about the results and often wonder if any aspects of what they test for have ever changed or perhaps been tweaked slightly as I’ve gotten older and experienced new things in life.
