Types of Career Assessment Inventories (aka Tests)

The most effective career planning solution uses various types of career tests (also known as inventories or assessments) to help you gain a better understanding of your career interests, motivational traits, personal work style, personality, values, skills, and aptitudes. Each test is designed to provide you with the appropriate information and feedback to help ensure that you will land in your ideal career and achieve career success.

Career Assessment Inventories include: 1) Career Interest Inventories, 2) Personality Inventories, 3) Values Inventories, and 4) Skills Inventories:

Career Interest Inventories

A career interest inventory surveys your interests, aptitudes, and preferences and matches the results to occupations that are best for you. A well designed interest inventory will help you find out more about yourself and how your choices relate to different careers, including making matches with occupational groups and specific occupations. This opens doors to options of which you were not aware! First developed in the late 1920s, career interest inventories have helped millions of people find the perfect career.

Personality Inventories

A personality inventory surveys your unique traits, key strengths, and personal work and communication styles, providing you with valuable insights about yourself. For example, you can learn how you function naturally, how you typically respond to demands from your environment, how you interact with others, your leadership style, and what motivates and demotivates you.

Values Inventories

A well designed values inventory will help you clarify and prioritize your work-related values, enabling you to make better career or job choices. Values are unique to each individual and typically change over time, thus values clarification is an ongoing process throughout your life and career. It is important to review periodically your values and priorities. For example, the values you had ten years ago may be quite different from your values today, and ten years from now they may be quite different again. Free Values Inventory

Skills Inventories

A skills inventory surveys your skills, identifying those skills that are transferable as well as preferences in using certain combinations of skills. All occupations can be classified according to the use of skills in three areas: 1) Skills with Things; 2) Skills with Information, and 3) Skills with People. Most occupations use skills in each of these three areas, however, the complexity of skills in each area differs. For example, mentoring is a skill with People, and receiving instructions is a skill with People, but these two People skills have differing degrees of complexity. Moreover, the way in which skills in these three areas blend together can be very similar or quite different depending upon the occupation. We often tend to have "tunnel" vision and only see a portion of our skills and accomplishments — intertwined with the environment, industry, or application in which they occurred. Many skills are transferable to entirely different environments, industries, or applications.