Career Tests

The most effective career planning advisors use different types of career tests to help you gain a better understanding of your career interests, motivational traits, personal work style, personality, values, skills, and aptitudes. Each test is designed to find your strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, you will want to explore different area of your personality and interests to find a career best suited to your interests and strengths. There are generally four areas that are tested, these are:

Career Interest
Personality
Values
Skills

Career Interest
A career interest test analyzes your interests, aptitudes, and preferences and matches the results to occupations that are best for you. This test should help you find out more about yourself and explain how your choices relate to different careers, including matching with occupational groups and specific occupations. These tests, which were developed in the 1920s, have become more specific and therefore more beneficial to those that use them.

Personality
A personality test analyzes your unique traits, key strengths, personal work and communication styles in order to provide you with insights about yourself. For example, how you typically respond to demands from your work, how you interact with others, your leadership style, and your motivational style.

Values
A values test should help you clarify and prioritize your work-related values. Values are unique to each individual and typically change over time; therefore values clarification is an ongoing process throughout your life and career. This may relate to the type of work you will feel comfortable doing and the type of company you would like to work with.

Skills
A skills test analyzes your skills and identifies the skills that are transferable as well as preferences in using certain combinations of skills. All occupations can be classified according to the use of skills in three areas: 1) Skills with Things; 2) Skills with Information, and 3) Skills with People. Most occupations use skills in each of these three areas, however, the complexity of skills in each area differs. Moreover, the way in which skills in these three areas blend together can be very similar or quite different depending upon the occupation. Many skills are transferable to entirely different environments, industries, or applications.

For free tests visit:
http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/CRC/CareerAssessmentCenter.htm