Interest and Personality Tests Shine Light on Career Fit

Solid data can inspire confidence in choosing academic and career directions.

In an ideal world, everyone would love their jobs.  They’d leap out of bed each morning eagerly looking forward to another day of success in jobs that truly inspired them and enriched their lives.  They would share their work with people who comprised a second family, in the truest sense.

Students would finish high school excited to continue their education and would embrace post-secondary programs consistent with their interests and natural gifts.  They would excel in their studies and build the skills, knowledge and achievements that would make employers sit up and take notice. 

As degrees or diplomas approached completion, recruiters would line up to offer challenging jobs that would lead to rewarding careers.  The biggest problem would be to decide which of many appealing opportunities represented the best starting point.

People’s choices of work and career directions would be easy.  They would be grounded in experience and insight, reflect an understanding of strengths and interests, and connect an individual’s skills, most comfortable behaviours and values with appropriate roles in the right fields of activity.

And, best of all, people would make choices based upon reliable, concrete data that complemented their intuition and experience.  They would complete readily available interest and personality tests and receive expert assistance to understand what the results could meaningfully contribute to their educational and career planning.

Well, unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world.  Most people struggle to find post-secondary programs that are genuinely appealing and in which they can invest time and energy with real enthusiasm.  They move forward in school and work because it seems they must, not because they have a confident sense of direction and goals or the experience upon which to base sound decisions. 

Most post-secondary programs are not vocationally oriented.  They do not dictate, or often even indicate, what kinds of work or careers build naturally upon the skills, perspectives and expertise that three or four years of study have refined. 

People flounder, choose blindly and make arbitrary and capricious decisions as they struggle to manage the transition from student to worker and find their place.  Great outcomes are more a result of good luck than good planning. 

We need to do a much better job of assisting students to make good post-secondary choices, new grads to understand where they fit best as they approach the end of their studies, and unhappy employees to identify roles and activities that will value their abilities.  Curiously, there are some tried and true tools available to facilitate effective career and educational planning, though few people are able to take advantage of them.

Interest testing has been around for over 100 years in one form or another.  The Strong Interest Inventory has long been the test of choice to help people understand how their interests relate to the interests of people working happily and successfully in various career fields.  It provides clear statistical correlations that tell people how similar or dissimilar their interests are to people excelling in different kinds of work.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has emerged during the past decades as a very effective means of assisting students and workers to grasp the connection between their preferred behaviours and prospective careers.  This tool is very useful in helping people understand how their strengths and personal qualities relate to people who are thriving in particular careers.

There is no perfect test or strategy for ensuring academic or workplace satisfaction and success.  If there were, everyone would be happy and successful, and this clearly is not the case for many unhappy students and the 50% of workers who routinely express dissatisfaction with their day-to-day work lives.

On the other hand, we can surely improve at helping people understand how key life experiences can shape good career decisions.  And we can do much better in providing people at all stages access to the interest and personality indicators that support confident educational and career planning.  So much depends upon it.