Self-Assessments of Skills, Interests, Values, Work Preferences, and Personality to Inform Career Direction
To determine your career path, it is often helpful to consider some of the components that affect your career choice. Here are a number of resources to help you consider those aspects of yourself and how they might impact your career journey.
Note: PathwayU includes several of these others assessments plus additional resources wrapped into an attractive, user-friendly bundle. However, you must do all the assessments at once the first time as it won’t save your results until you’ve completed all of them (though you can retake them individually later). PathwayU is recommended if you have time. If you only have 10-20 minutes available at a time, consider doing the other assessments instead. Skills and Strengths assessments are not included in PathwayU.
Comprehensive Self-Assessment
PathwayU has assessments for interests, values, personality, and workplace preferences PLUS resources to unpack your results and apply the to your career journey. If you have time and interest, this is a quality tool for self-assessment, complete with multiple quizzes and worksheets to dig deeply into these areas. This paid resource is provided by the College of Wooster to its students and employees.
Interests
The O*NET Interest Profiler, a free assessment provided by the U.S. Dept. of Labor, can help you find out what your interests are and how they relate to the world of work. You can find out what you like to do then use that information to help decide what kinds of careers you might want to explore. This is a fairly quick assessment.
Personality
16Personalities is a free personality assessment based on the Myers-Briggs personality types. Once you’ve taken this moderate length assessment, it’ll provide you with ideas about many aspects of life including career paths and workplace habits associated with your type.
Skills
Careeronestop, sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Labor, offers this free skills assessment, Skills Matcher. It will ask you to rate your current skill level in 40 areas and the suggest careers that fit your responses.
Work Values
Careeronestop also offers this ranking-style assessment to determine what work values are strongest for you. It will ask you to determine which features of a job or work environment are most important to you.
Strengths
The Clifton StrengthsFinder test is an assessment that will offer you a list of your top 5 strengths (or your ranking for all 40 strengths if you’d like to pay) as well as some worksheets to provide guidance on what to do with the information to improve your performance as a student and professional. The assessment will take a moderate amount of time, but the information provided is extremely valuable. If you haven’t taken it already (some students did when they started at Wooster), we will pay for your test. Just contact Career Planning for more information.
Browse Careers
MyNextMove.org is an excellent repository of information from the U.S. Department of Labor. At this site, you can browse careers by key words or by industry (or by interest assessment results) and find great information about the kinds of knowledge, skills, personality, and values needed for a particular career, as well as education levels, technology, and job outlook (including salary information).
