The most important aspect of finding your dream job is to look for the job or career that is matched and compatible with your personality. This may sound relatively simple, however often we often don’t have a clue about what different careers really involve and too often people find themselves “ending up” in a career without ever having made a conscious choice to do so. Resources for career counseling, including career tests, can be a great help in giving people the power to make a career decisions. So what are some of the resources available to people and how can they be most effectively used to achieve outcomes?
Job Search Websites and Databases
The Internet is an exhaustive information source that allows us to select from an ever growing list of options. Most online resources help job seekers find a job based on their personal preference and skill. Unfortunately, as often happens candidates are forced to search for and take jobs that meet their requirements at that point in time based on factors such as salary, location, and often simply what jobs are on offer at the time. If not careful however, once a job seeker takes a job or role based on such factors however, they have often unknowingly move further from achieving their true career goal. Job seekers using this methods to decide on a career may eventually feel they have found themselves ultimately unhappy and in a job or career that is not suited to their personality or to them.
Identifying What Is “Really” Important To You
A critical aspect of finding a career well matched to your personality is to understand what is important to you. It sounds simple but surprisingly few job seekers actually do this. There are a few ways one can do this. You could make a list of all the things you think are important to you in a job and then place them in order from most important to least important. You could then access a jobs database and review the many thousands of jobs and careers in order to locate those that suitably match your list of priorities. While this process could potentially be successful, it would be extremely time consuming and fortunately there are more effective and time efficient ways of going about this process. One such method is for job seekers to take a career test, which when completed will review all their job preferences and personality traits before providing them with a list of all the jobs suited to their personality. Most quality tests, such as the Strong Interest Inventory (SII) also go a step further and provide a good list of detailed action steps to guide the person in taking the necessary steps to move toward achieving their desired career.
Ensure you use a quality Career Test only
Career tests aren’t career tests, just as “oils ain’t oils”. What is meant by this is that there are many career tests or “Quizzes” on the internet today which, while fun to play around with, are along way from quality career advice and are often very unreliable. In order to use a career test to help you find a job suited to your personality you need to find a test you can rely on. This is easier said than done but the only reliable or trusted way of doing this is to select a career test or questionnaire which is backed by solid research data and one which hasn’t just been created by the webmaster of the site you are visiting. For example, as mentioned above the Strong Interest Inventory is a career test which has been used by professional career counselors around the world for many years, and has had many revisions and updates. It is based on years of research and its developers publish its reliability and validity data which is publicly available. Free career tests and quizzes on the internet may make many claims, but when was the last time you saw one that actually provided you with concrete reliability and validity figures and measures?
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