Self-Assessments to Help with Career Decisions
To determine your career path, it is often helpful to consider a wide range of components that affect your career choice. Here are a number of resources to help you consider various aspects of yourself and how they might impact your career journey.
There are so many! Which one(s) should I take?
Have time and interest?
We recommend that you do these from the collection below:
- PathwayU – Includes 4 assessments: interests, values, personality, and workplace preferences
- Personality – more comprehensive than personality test in PathwayU.
- Skills
- Strengths
- Then poke around Australia’s Tips and MyNextMove
Have a half hour but less interest?
Keep it simple and just do:
- PathwayU
Have interest, but not much time?
Do these shorter assessments whenever you have time.
Note: These are also assessments that are free for everyone, so they’re good for sharing with non-CoW folks for their own self-assessment.
- Interests
- Personality
- Skills
- Work Values
PathwayU – Comprehensive Self-Assessment
*Includes 4 assessments
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 (20-30 min) 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. Does not include Skills or Strengths (below).
Recommended: do a coaching session with CEE staff to better understand your results. Instructions for booking here.
Interests
*Included in PathwayU
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.
Be sure to record your results!
Personality
*Similar test included in PathwayU, but this test has more comprehensive results for use in many parts of life.
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.
Be sure to record your results! The first four letters are especially helpful to know for random conversations as Myers-Briggs is a common personality test.
Skills
*Not included in PathwayU
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.
Be sure to record your results!
Work Values
*Included in PathwayU
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.
Be sure to record your results!
This resource, from the Australian government, offers more workplace preference considerations and some careers associated with common preferences.
Strengths
*Not included in PathwayU
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.
This paid-for-by-CoW assessment will take a moderate amount of time, but the information provided is extremely valuable. The link below will tell you how to get a test code. When you complete the assessment, we recommend that you do a coaching session with one of Wooster’s trained StrengthsFinder coaches in order to maximize your ability to use your results. Instructions for booking here.
Be sure to record your results! This is another common test that can come up in regular conversation from time to time, so you may wish to memorize your top five strengths.
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).
