Personality and professional success are closely linked in countless ways, and changing one can often have profound effects on the other. But how do you make healthy, deliberate changes to maximize growth and happiness?
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For decades, the connection between personality and profession has been one of the most important factors in predicting career satisfaction. From analyzing how well a young person might perform in their first career to helping established professionals change careers altogether, experts use personality tests to help match people with specific jobs.
Across all studies, research indicates that the link between personality and professional success goes both ways: while having a good grasp of who you are can mean better career outcomes, better career outcomes can also help reinforce who you are by building confidence, enthusiasm, and job satisfaction.
But how do you actually use a personality test for career growth? Below, we'll give you a comprehensive assessment of personality tests, how to understand your results, and key factors to consider when deciding if they're right for you.
More than 3 million professionals have entrusted us with their career personality testing to date, and 98% of those came away satisfied and empowered.
With the amount of data we gather for each test, it only makes sense that we'd need a powerful method of analyzing that information. Luckily, our use of machine learning turns thousands of sources into one clear, user-friendly report.
Our algorithms pull from available information as you take your test, ensuring answers that reflect the current moment.
Despite its complexity and advanced technology, our career personality test takes only fifteen minutes to complete, and our intuitive user interface guides you through each and every question.
Unlike other career tests, which apply the same set of questions to everyone, our test learns more about you with every question answered. This allows us to tailor not only your results, but also the testing process itself to who you are.
Every customer comes to JobTest.org with a unique set of circumstances, which is why we emphasize customizability in both our process and feedback. No matter what kind of information you want, our results tailor themselves to your needs.
Like all good personality tests, a career personality test asks questions to gauge your personality traits, natural behaviors, and how you might fit best into the professional world. In practice, this works out to three simple steps:
The majority of people who come to us for career testing are established professionals well into their careers. Sometimes, these people want insight into how to grow in their current roles. Other times, people come to us looking for advice on whether they should change careers altogether and how best to make that decision work.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, our in-depth career personality profiler will give you all the information you could ever want about your personality type, areas to work on, and job recommendations to maximize your happiness and success.
As the job market becomes ever-more competitive, an increasing number of teenagers and young college students look to career tests for guidance or to gain an edge over the competition. For some, the insights gained from a career test for teens can help determine the right university, design a major, or streamline a course schedule for maximum results. Some students—either recently graduated or on the brink—use these tests to plan the early steps into their first careers.
With young people, however, it's important to remember that high school and the years immediately following are some of the most crucial for personality change and development. For that reason, you should only trust companies that clearly and compassionately explain their test results in a way that recognizes and embraces the change to come.
For decades, experts believed that an individual's personality stayed more or less the same throughout their lifetime. Modern psychology, however, now recognizes that not only can personalities change, but they're often most influenced by large life events like a career change.
Still, whether these changes are for better or worse depends largely on how a person approaches them. Caught unprepared, the stress or demands of a career shift may damage confidence and increase anxiety. Conversely, going into a new phase of your career with the proper perspective and preparation can improve your professional outcomes and help you grow into a stronger, more emotionally capable person.
To gain this perspective and preparedness, few tools match the advantages offered by a reliable career personality test. These advantages include things such as the following:
Career personality tests are built on the principles of time-tested psychology, which means they can help you build a solid foundation of understanding. By doing so, you prepare yourself to go into even the most radical of professional and personal changes while remaining confident in who you are and what you need.
Often, career changes come with a hefty dose of anxiety or impostor syndrome. Left unchecked, these doubts can have a real, severe impact on your self-confidence and job performance. With a career personality test, you can anchor yourself with facts to weather even the strongest storms of self-doubt.
Because we live with ourselves every day, it can be difficult to notice when our priorities or values shift—and sometimes, that awareness comes too late. By taking the time to complete a comprehensive personality test, you take a step back and gain perspective on who you are, how you've changed, and what that means for your career options.
Just like career aptitude tests help you gain a better understanding of your skills and potential, personality tests can show you ways to work on yourself and your relationships in the professional world. That way, you can assess areas in need of growth and take the necessary steps to address them.
Defining who you are and what you want can sometimes feel like chasing shadows—elusive and hard to pin down. When you take a personality test, you give yourself the vocabulary and context you need to better understand your emotions, desires, and values.
Like all career tests, a personality test designed around career growth can help give you the answers you need to make smarter, more effective choices in your professional life. By investing in the process, you give yourself powerful benefits, including:
If you're anything like most people, you do your best work when your actions align with your values and natural behaviors. To ensure you're as in sync as possible, it's essential to take the time and take stock of who you are and how you might have changed since you began your career.
It may be that you already have a fundamental understanding of your personality and how you feel about career subjects but lack the necessary vocabulary to explain that understanding to the people around you. Luckily, a good personality assessment gives you just that by offering psychological terms, resources, and even visual representations to improve your emotional literacy.
With a hard skills or aptitude test like those offered in most high schools, you gain an objective but relatively narrow set of data. Because a personality assessment can benefit both personal and professional growth, your results are much more versatile than with other tests. Whether it's career interests or personal relationships, the fifteen minutes you spend with JobTest.org's personality assessment can help you grow in any number of ways.
When trying to assess something as complicated and mercurial as a personality, having a well-built framework of questions is invaluable. Still, like all career tests, accurate answers come from accurate questions, so finding a personality assessment that bases its process on respected psychological research is a must.
Whether it was in school, for a job interview, or just online during your free time, you've likely taken a personality test at least once in your life. For career tests, companies typically choose to limit their assessments to one of the five most popular psychological exams outlined below.
Conversely, JobTest.org believes that limiting information only limits results, which is why we combine the best aspects of modern psychology to provide a more well-rounded, comprehensive report.
Depending on your needs and the challenges ahead, different types of career tests may be more or less valuable than others. For those prioritizing emotional growth or wanting a clearer grasp of their work personality, a personality assessment may be the single best career test possible. For others, a career aptitude test or one focusing on hard skills may be more relevant.
To help, we'll outline the pros and cons of a personality assessment as well as how to decide whether it's the right choice for you.
In many ways, a career personality test is similar to any other kind of career assessment test: you answer questions about your interests, values, skills, and history to help establish a list of potential careers.
Due to its special emphasis on personality, however, this kind of test devotes more time to determining who you are as a person, then relates that information to the professional world in clear, easily-understood terms.
By the end of the test, the goal is to have renewed your understanding of who you are, what you value most in a career, and what type of work environment you might flourish in.
Even the most straightforward career quizzes can prove challenging, but something as personal as a personality-based test demands extra focus. When starting your test, we suggest the following:
Depending on what technologies or psychological methods a company uses to build its test, you may need to follow specific procedures for the best results. Always make sure to carefully read the accompanying instructions and guidance while taking a personality test.
These tests are designed to ultimately reduce stress and improve confidence, so it doesn't make sense to take them while anxious. Before starting, try to find fifteen minutes during the day when you're the most relaxed, unpressured, and able to fully devote yourself to the task at hand.
During the testing process, you may feel the urge to qualify or hedge your answers. Maybe it's due to preconceived notions about how you "should" feel. Maybe it's because you have a version of yourself you want to be true. Regardless, you'll only get real value from your results if you remain open and honest while answering.
Typically, these tests are meant to gauge your natural behaviors, inclinations, and emotions when confronted with different circumstances. By overthinking or spending too long on any one question, you reduce the likelihood that your eventual answer will match your natural truth.
A well-built personality test can provide powerful tools for personal and professional development. That said, at the end of the day, you know yourself better than any test, so you have the ultimate say in how much or how little you take your results to heart. Remember that a personality test is meant to help, not hurt, and any tough realities exposed during the process are only another step toward a stronger, more emotionally healthy you.
Typically, your results will contain a mixture of relatively obvious insights and those requiring more contemplation. Before you begin the work of incorporating these insights into your personal development, take the time to fully consider each piece of information in your results.
After you've completed your test and digested your results, it's time to start thinking about how to put those results to work. Luckily, JobTest.org's process involves various resources and tools intended to help you do just that, from a comprehensive breakdown of your personality assessment to degree or career matches related to your personality traits.
Once you’ve started to put your plan into action and begin seeing results, it may be that you view your personality assessment in a new light. Remember that these results are yours to keep forever, so consider coming back and revisiting them as you reach new benchmarks in your career or job hunt. That way, you can continually find value and new meaning as you develop into a stronger, more confident professional.
The question we hear most often from those who have yet to take a career personality test is, "Why shouldn't I just take a free version?" The answer boils down to two crucial differences, which are:
Typically, a personality test will use either the Holland Codes, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Big Five system, all of which are based on reliable, factual psychology. The issue, however, comes when a company or organization fails to translate that psychology into a well-built, approachable test.
Often, this means that a free career test will offer shallow, incomplete, or even inaccurate feedback by not investing the time and money necessary to build a truly useful test. While this means little for those using personality tests for the entertainment factor, it can mean everything if you're looking for trustworthy insights into your career.
For us, this factor is, by far, the most important difference between free results and those offered by a paid service like JobTest.org. With a free personality quiz, your results usually consist of basic, limited information pulled directly from whichever psychological research they used. Again, while this may be interesting, it does almost nothing to help you make actual progress in your career.
With JobTest.org, this issue is nonexistent. Instead of one-size-fits-all feedback, our career test results come with clear, step-by-step guidance about how to start making real progress toward professional success. Whether it's advice about education and certifications, insight into strengths to hone or weaknesses to address, or real-world companies to research, our job isn't over until the day your dream job begins.
If you still have questions, that’s completely okay. We’re in the business of questions.