Learning Objectives
- Describe how personality tests and skills inventories help to evaluate career paths and identify personal interests to meet educational goals.
The journey of achieving success in college begins with a single step: identifying your personal values. Your personal values are your core beliefs and guiding principles. They shape the roles you play in daily life. They color your interests and passions, and frame your thoughts and words. In essence, your values are a compass that help you make decisions and choices.
What are your values, then? Which are most important to you, and which are least important? How do your values fit into your educational goals? How do your educational goals relate to your future career?
To help you answer these questions, you can use a “self-assessment” survey. These surveys can help you evaluate your personal identity—your thoughts, actions, attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors—in relationship to the task at hand, like going to college and preparing for a career.
Many different self-assessment surveys are available from college career centers and online sites. Some are designed as personality tests, like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, or as inventories, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MTBI®), the most widely used personality inventory in history. You may also come across instruments designed as scales, or measures, games, surveys, and more. These descriptors are often interchangeably used, although most often they refer to questionnaires. The distinctions are not as important as whether or not the instrument meets your self-assessment needs.
Some popular, free surveys are noted here.
| SURVEY INSTRUMENT | DESCRIPTION | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ISEEK Career Cluster Interest Survey
ISEEK Careers / Minnesota Colleges and Universities |
This online survey lets you rate activities you enjoy, your personal qualities, and school subjects you like. Then you can see which career clusters are a match for your interests. |
| 2 | Values Clarification Questionnaire
InSite / Electric Eggplant |
This online survey, in two parts, looks at the specific values of ambition, appearance, family, friendship, independence, wealth, education, freedom, happiness, privacy, security, honesty. A scorecard and interpretation are generated. |
| 3 | Career Interest Survey
CheckOutACollege.com / Community and Technical Colleges of Washington State |
This online survey allows you to select activities you like to do, personality traits that describe you, and subjects that interest you. Auto results suggest one or more of sixteen career clusters that match your selections. |
