Self assessment in career planning can be a survey, a test, or reflection questions to help you identify your interests, passions, skills, strengths and weaknesses.
Different types of assessments focus on specific areas, such as skills, interests, or values. Typically, an assessment asks you to answer questions about what you like, don’t like, what’s important to you, and what your strengths are.
Why is self-assessment important?
Assessing yourself is the first step in career planning. You need to know what you are good at and what you value in life. The answers to these questions can help you determine what career is a good fit for you and whether or not a career aligns with your values.
Assessments help you, your parents, teachers and counselors understand about you better. From there, you will receive advice, suggestions and many useful resources on career development.
Common type of assessments
There are many assessments online that you can take for free. Some of the most common assessments used for career development are:
Skill Exploration: Skill Matchers from careeronestop.org is a quick survey with less than 50 questions asking how good you are at doing certain tasks. The results will show your top skills and automatically match them with careers that need those skills. Take the assessment here: https://www.careeronestop.org/toolkit/Skills/skills-matcher.aspx
Interest Exploration: Holland Code Career Test will show you which jobs will suit your interests, talents, and aptitude. Get scores for 6 major job areas to guide your career planning here https://www.truity.com/test/holland-code-career-test
Personality Exploration: The Personal Strength Inventory has been taken by more than a million people in the world. This test will give you scores on certain personality traits and explain how it will help you in your personal growth. You can take the test here: https://www.truity.com/test/personal-strengths-inventory
