Discover your career interests

What motivates you? How do you define success? Career satisfaction stems from a clearer understanding of what you want. This understanding can take time to develop, and what you want might be a moving target. It’s important to start your career with some self-awareness and to make time throughout your life to reassess what you want and what makes you happy. Career self-assessment involves the following four components:

  • Values: What’s important to you
  • Interests: What you love
  • Personality: What motivates you and makes you happy
  • Skills: What you’re good at

Taking time to reflect on these things will help you to build stronger resumes, write more compelling cover letters, and interview with focus and confidence.

How to self-assess

Self-assessment is about more than discovering your motivations, needs, interests, values and skills. It’s also about prioritizing them. Regardless of the type of assessment you decide to take, we encourage you to take time to reflect on what the results mean to you. You might also want to talk with friends, family members, supporters, advisors or other people you trust to get their insight on how you are reflected in the results. We’ve got tools to help you and experienced staff to walk you through the process.

Assessment Tools

Here are some of the assessment tools and resources that exist to help you:

Students, postdocs, and alumni (up to 2 years post-graduation) have access to guided assessments including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Strong Interest Inventory (SII), Gallup CliftonStrengths (StrengthsQuest), CareerLeader, and Skillscan. These assessments require a trained professional to administer and we will also help you debrief your results.

To determine which self-assessment tool best meets your needs and to arrange for an access code, make an appointment with a career advisor.

These sites typically provide free assessment tools that may help you learn more about your values, interests, personality, and skills. Please be mindful about sharing personal information or data with sites if you are uncomfortable disclosing aspects of your identity.

Values: learning about your values can help you with your career planning, job/internship search, and offer decision making. As you reflect upon your results from a values exercise, think about how your target occupation or organization supports your values.

  • Think2Perform – provide an interactive way to define what you value most and set the stage for behaviors and performance more closely aligned with your ideal self.
  • CareerOneStop Work Values Matcher – a quick card sort exercise that asks you to rank statements to define your ideal job. Your choices indicate your top values.

Interests: learning about your interests can help you with career exploration and your job/internship search. As you reflect upon your results from an interest exercise, consider how you might incorporate your interests into your daily work tasks and continual professional development.

  • O*Net Interest Profiler – this brief assessment can help you find what your interests are and how they relate to the world of work.
  • Career Test – an assessment that can help you understand more about what you might like to do based on aspects of your personality.
  • CareerOneStop Interest Assessment – helps you identify different careers based on what you indicate you like to do versus what you don’t like to do.

Personality: your personality profile might help you understand more about your leadership, communication, or interpersonal style. This insight might help you integrate better into a team or organization. Oftentimes your personality offers your preferred style and should not act as a limit to your career.

  • 16 Personalities Test – this test is very similar to the MBTI and offers detailed explanations of the personality 16 types.
  • Big Five Personality Test – this assessment outlines results on five different factors: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and intellect/imagination.
  • Open Extended Jungian Type Scales – similar to the MBTI, this assessment provides results on 16 different personality types.
  • Enneagram Personality Scale – popular among spiritual and self-help practitioners, this assessment provides results on nine different personality types.

Skills: your skills can put your talents directly to work. Identifying your skills can help you immediately connect with different occupations.

Other tools: these are additional assessments, inventories, and tests that may provide additional insights.

  • Find your purpose – these activities can help you reflect on your purpose.
  • Open Psychometrics – this site provides a list of different assessment tools that are free to access.
  • Balance Careers – this article lists of several different free assessments.

If you need help decided what self-assessment tool best meets your needs or if you would like to debrief your results with someone, make an appointment with a career advisor.

Next steps

As you get a clearer idea about what you’re good at and what motivates, interests, and matters to you, you’ll want to explore options and career interests that align with what you’ve learned about yourself.

As you continue through this process, connect with a career advisor to talk with about what you are discovering for additional guidance.

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Featured Resources

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