I’ve taken numerous career tests over the past few years.Career assessments can be expensive and some just weren’t worth my money.I’ll review a few of my favorite tests and explain what features I liked about each.
Project Career
In Project Career’s assessment,you are given a list of individual activities.You must select whether you would like the activity,dislike it,or neither.This method allows for the incorporation of your interests,values,skills and personality into one test because the activities you prefer reflect all of these factors.I like that this test assesses your preference for each activity individually rather than making you choose one activity out of two or three.The results are reported by industry rather than listing individual jobs.A detailed description is provided for each of your top industries,including employment outlook and sample job titles.I found the results of this assessment to be the most accurate of all the assessments I’ve taken.
MyPlan
MyPlan.com offers four assessments (skills,interests,personality,values) and a composite score of all assessments you choose to take.The values assessment is free while the other three assessments are $7.97-$9.95 each.The complete package is $19.95.Once you purchase access to an assessment,you can take it over as many times as you wish.In my experience,the values assessment was most accurate while the skills test was least accurate (sometimes it’s hard to make an accurate assessment of your own abilities).
LiveCareer
With each question on the LiveCareer test,you are given a choice of three activities similar to those you would perform in different jobs.You must rate which activity you would like to do most and which you would like to do least.It’s free to take the 100-question test and get a basic report,which shows your top and bottom interest areas.The premium report,which lists your top 20 job matches,costs $24.95.I found the interest areas and job categories to be more accurate than the actual job matches.The deluxe report (which I didn’t purchase) will give your top 100 job matches,but I think you should simply consider all the careers from your top five categories as the report suggests.
In the results of the career tests I’ve taken,there have been recommended careers that I have absolutely no interest in at all.However,there were two or three careers that appeared in the results of almost every test I took.These are the areas that I focused on when deciding what I career wanted to pursue.For more career planning resources,read The Top 10 Sites for Choosing a Career or Career Match:Connecting Who You Are with What You’ll Love to Do