Types of Career Assessment Inventories (aka Tests)

The most effective career planning solution uses various types of career tests (also known as inventories or assessments) to help you gain a better understanding of your career interests, motivational traits, personal work style, personality, values, skills, and aptitudes. Each test is designed to provide you with the appropriate information and feedback to help ensure that you will land in your ideal career and achieve career success.

Career assessment inventories include career interest inventories, personality inventories, and work-related values inventories:

Career Interest Inventories

First developed in the late 1920s, career interest inventories have helped millions of people find their ideal career. A career interest inventory surveys your interests, aptitudes, and preferences and compares the results to occupations that are best for you. A well designed interest inventory will help you find out more about yourself and how your choices relate to different careers, including making matches with occupational groups and specific occupations. A career interest inventory helps you gain the self-knowledge needed to discover careers and occupations that best match the characteristics of your interests, abilities, and preferences.

If you would like to assess your career interests, we would suggest the Self-Directed Search — the most widely used interest inventory in the world. This inventory utilizes a self-directed career planning model and provides career options for populations ranging from seasoned professionals and managers seeking a career change, to students planning their first career. Millions have successfully used this inventory to help find their ideal career and achieve greater professional success.

Personality Inventories

A personality inventory surveys your unique traits, key strengths, and personal work and communication styles, providing you with valuable insights about yourself. For example, you can learn how you function naturally, how you typically respond to demands from your environment, how you interact with others, your leadership style, and what motivates and demotivates you.

Some personality inventories, like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are meant to be administered by trained professionals such as Career Counselors and Psychologists, while other personality inventories such as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter can be self-administered. Although not as comprehensive as a personality inventory, if you would like to see your preferred work style, take the quick and free Work Preference Inventory.

Values Inventories

A well designed values inventory will help you clarify and prioritize your work-related values, enabling you to make better career or job choices. Values are unique to each individual and typically change over time, thus values clarification is an ongoing process throughout your life and career. It is important to review periodically your values and priorities. For example, the values you had ten years ago may be quite different from your values today, and ten years from now they may be quite different again. If you would like to clarify and prioritize your values as they pertain to your working life, take the free InSight™ Values Inventory.