Trying to figure out what you want to do next can be harder than it sounds. Maybe you’re unhappy in your current career but don’t know what you’d rather be doing. Maybe you’re considering a career change and have no idea where to start. Or maybe you’ve taken a few online career quizzes and ended up with a list of careers that doesn’t feel particularly helpful.
There are a lot of career assessments out there. Some can be useful, but the key is knowing what you’re actually trying to learn from them. Here are three career exploration tools we recommend, and how to use them.
1. The Ideal Career Model™—A good place to start if you’re not sure what you’re looking for
One of the biggest mistakes people make when exploring careers is jumping straight to job titles. They start searching for things like “best careers for people who like helping others” or “careers for creative people.” The problem is that a career is rarely a good fit because of one characteristic.
You can be good at something and not enjoy doing it. You can love the subject matter but dislike the day-to-day work. You can have the right skills but find the workplace frustrating. That’s why I developed the Ideal Career Model™. Our model takes a broader look at career fit, including your interests, strengths, skills, values, personality, work preferences, and other factors that influence whether you’ll be satisfied in your work.
Instead of trying to tell you which career you should choose, it helps you identify what you’re actually looking for in a career. For example, you might realize that you want work that:
Uses your strengths regularly
Gives you opportunities to learn and grow
Aligns with your values
Provides the right amount of independence and collaboration
Lets you use skills you enjoy using
Fits your personality and preferred work style
Once you know those things, you have something much more useful than a generic list of “top careers for you.” You have criteria you can use to evaluate real career options. And that’s an important distinction. Career exploration isn’t about finding a quiz that gives you the answer. It’s about figuring out what a good answer would look like for you.
Learn more about our Ideal Career Model™
2. CliftonStrengths (StrengthsFinder)—A good way to dig deeper into what you naturally do well
If you’ve ever been told to “play to your strengths,” you may have wondered what your strengths actually are. That’s where CliftonStrengths, formerly called StrengthsFinder, can be helpful. CliftonStrengths identifies your natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The results can help you put words to things that may come naturally to you but that you’ve never really thought about as strengths.
For example, maybe you’re the person everyone comes to when a project gets off track. Or you’re naturally good at seeing connections that other people miss. Maybe you enjoy bringing people together, organizing complicated information, or coming up with new ideas. Those are useful clues when you’re thinking about your career.
The important thing is not to look at your results and say, “I have this strength, so I should become a _____.” Most strengths can be used in many different careers. A person who is a strong communicator could be a coach, manager, recruiter, salesperson, teacher, consultant, or writer. The strength itself doesn’t determine the career. It helps you understand what you might want to do more of.
If you take CliftonStrengths, spend some time thinking about where your strengths show up in your current work and where you wish you could use them more. At Create Your Career Path, our Strengths Assessment Session can also help you make sense of your results and connect them to your career.
3. The Big Five Personality Test—A free way to learn more about your personality
Personality is another piece of the career puzzle. It can influence how you prefer to work, how much interaction you want with other people, how you respond to change, and whether you prefer structure or flexibility.
If you want to explore this area, we recommend the free Big Five Personality Test from Open Psychometrics. The test looks at five broad personality traits and gives you a percentile score for each one, showing how your results compare with those of other people who have taken the test.
Use your results as another way to think about your work preferences. For example, a higher score in conscientiousness might suggest that you enjoy organization and structure, while a lower score in extraversion might indicate that you prefer more independent work.
Don’t take any one result too literally. Your personality doesn’t determine what career you can or can’t have. Instead, use the results as information that can help you think about what types of work and work environments may be a good fit for you.
So, Which Career Assessment Should You Take?
If you’re starting from scratch and really don’t know what direction you want to go, we recommend starting with our Ideal Career Model™. It gives you a comprehensive way to think about career fit rather than focusing on just one part of the equation. From there, CliftonStrengths can be useful if you want to take a closer look at your strengths, and the Big Five can give you another perspective on your personality.
You don’t have to take every assessment available. In fact, taking assessment after assessment can become another form of procrastination. At some point, you have to take what you’ve learned and start exploring actual careers. Look at job descriptions. Talk to people who do the work. Try something new. Research industries. Pay attention to what energizes you and what drains you.
The assessments are there to help you make better decisions, not make the decision for you. And that’s really the point of career exploration. You’re not looking for a computer-generated answer to the question, “What should I do with my life?” You’re looking for a clearer understanding of yourself so you can make a career choice that actually makes sense for you.
