Whether you are a high school student or at the initial phases of your professional life or have years of experience, the first step to figure out your career choices or professional growth would be to take a personality and skills assessment testing. Psychometric tests can do exactly the same by measuring your interests, personality, and aptitude.
An interest-based career aptitude test is suitable for students, job-seekers, career-shifters and career-returnees, all alike. Interest tests measure how people differ in their motivation, values, and opinions in relation to their interests. Occasionally, a student is not sure about where their true strengths lie and unaware of what career pathways they should follow. It is possible that their real interest in a specific field may or may not be in sync with their actual aptitudes. Interest-based assessment tests will help them identify their strongest work-related interests. Knowing their work interests can help them decide what kinds of jobs and careers they want to discover.
There are many such interest-based tests available today and Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is one such popular interest inventory (developed by Edward Kellog Strong, Jr) that is used in career assessment. The aim of this interest assessment test is to understand a person's interests, so that they may have less trouble in deciding on a suitable career. According to Strong, interests are based on a person’s amount of ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ a particular task/occupation that could be used to distinguish among different occupational groups which would finally decide his career. Strong developed several measures that differentiated groups of people, based on their answers to such interest-based test questions.
The interest tests are available online and can be taken from anywhere at any time. They analyse your preference for six different types of work: “realistic,” or physical and mechanical work; “investigative” work in the science of technology; “artistic” work; “social” work; “enterprising” work; and “conventional” work. The tests comprise of several questions based on real-life situations and you are asked to select the career preferences in which you are interested and which you would like to pursue i.e., to rate how much you would enjoy doing each job or task. The questions describe work activities that some people do at their jobs. While taking the test, it is not important to think about whether you have enough education or training to perform the activity, or how much money you would make performing the activity. Simply think about whether you would "like" or "dislike" performing the work activity. Then your fields of interest are mapped to your personality and aptitude. Once a test is completed, a report is generated which gives deeper insight into the questions you have answered which help you better plan your future. Usually, a team of professional psychologists are involved in the design and deliver a psychometric test to answer these questions.
Career interest inventories help you see the connection between characteristics of your own self and characteristics of particular career fields and occupations. The interest assessment tests surely help you identify your strongest work-related interests which is very important because they ultimately help you decide what kinds of careers you want to explore thereby helping you identify occupations that can satisfy your particular interests. This is not exactly a ‘test’ (that is why they are called inventories) where there are right or wrong answers to the questions asked. The goal is for you to learn more about your personal work-related interests. There is no time limit for completing the questions so an individual taking the test can do it at their own pace. But, the test results do not provide a concluding answer. They, however, do provide a significant step in your decision-making procedure and career-planning, which will spread over time as you explore, evolve and learn more about the outside world.
These tests come to your rescue when you feel so lost that you can't imagine how you're going to be able to choose a major or you feel so clueless that determining a career path seems impossible. Or you feel so unsure of the thought of actually pursuing about the major or career path you have already chosen. In short, you just don't know what you'd be good at or what would make you happy when it comes to selecting a major or a future career. When used wisely, interest-based career tests can help you get a better sense of who you are and where you might fit in the varieties of available careers.
Individuals need guidance identifying careers that suit their strengths, preferences and abilities and interest-based tests give them a great amount of information about how they approach towards them. Results from career guide sites indicate that these can be extremely valuable in giving people a right push in choosing career paths that fit their interests, best utilize their skills or match their personalities. These tests measure what they say they measure and are consistent which makes them valid and reliable. However, it should be remembered that these tests do not point you to your dream job. Interest based career tests measures only your areas of interests, and the results are merely suggestions based on that area of assessment. Also, if an individual deliberately or subconsciously answers questions to fit an outcome he or she already has in mind, the results will not be useful.
