Career Assessment

The purpose of career assessment is to better understand yourself and find out your perfect career options. It involves your self-awareness and an awareness of the world. It should be the the foundation of your career planning.

In this process, you can use career tests to discover your personalities (what allows you to be yourself), values (what do you highly esteem or makes you happy), interests (what you enjoy doing), skills (what you are really good at) and attitude (your feelings towards outside world). Be 100 percent honest to yourself in the tests though. Sometime, people may come up an answer that make us look more like the people we wish we were, or our friends and families want us to be. This may be unintentionally but try to avoid it since it's not helpful in your long term career planning.

The result of this self-evaluation is to find career options that matchh your liking. So you also need to have a clear picture of the job market. For example, you may want to know all those occupations out there in real world. According to U.S. Department of Labor, there are about 22,000 occupationss in Amercian society. With some exploration, you may find that some people are earning a living that you may never thought of, and one of them might just be the perfect career for you.

Many popular career assessment instruments are based on Holland's codes which was developed by Dr. John Holland. In his theory, most people and occupations can be classified into six types: realistic (R), artistic (A), conventional (C), investigative (I), social (S), and enterprising (E). Most people can be characterized by a combination of three types and assigned a Holland Code like E-A-S. Occupational environments can be divided into the same types. A good career choice is one that matchs your Holland Code with occupations that have the same code.

The following is a brief explanations of these six types:

Realistic - Realistic people are often good at mechanical or athletic jobs. They like to work with their hands and things like: machines, tools, and plants. They are often practical and good at solving problems. Investigative - Investigative people tend to be good at math, science, and analyzing data. They like to watch, learn, analyze, and solve problems. They often like to work independently.

Artistic - Artistic people like to work in unstructured situations where they can use their creativity and come up with new ideas. They enjoy performing (theatre or music) and visual arts.

Social - Social people like to work directly with people rather than things. They enjoy training, instructing, counseling, and performing.

Enterprising - Enterprising people like to work with other people. They particularly enjoy influencing, persuading, and performing. They like to lead and tend to be assertive and enthusiastic.

Conventional - Conventional people are very detail-oriented and like to work with data. They have good organizational and numerical abilities and are good at following instructions. Conventional people also like working in structured situations.

You can find many career test instruments on internet, the following link leads you to a free career assessment based on Holland's Codes.

Career Assessment Game By Missouri University

There are also many career tests online to help your career assessment.