Step One: Personal Assessment

Step 1: Personal Assessment

Unsure of your major? Not sure about your future? Perhaps you may want to consider self assessment and learning more about yourself. This is an important step as it involves gathering information about yourself that will assist you in making meaningful decisions about your career major. The data from this stage will become an important resource as you continue with the next stages of career planning.

Conducting an effective self-inventory is not an easy task. This stage of career development requires you to examine your life’s activities. It requires your reflective effort, as well as guidance from your family, counselors, and teachers along with appropriate tests.

You need to combine/integrate the assessment results from a number of self-inventory areas in order to get a complete picture of your personal characteristics and life. The importance of measuring these areas is the interplay of the specific results.

We’ve listed a number of career assessments (often called "test") that can help you generate career options based on your interest, skills, values, and personality characteristics. To take any of the tests all you need to do is to click on the web address for that test. There are four different types of career assessment inventories. Click on one of the following:

1. Personality Inventories-Personality Inventories will focus on how you view yourself, how you respond to the demands of your environment and how you interact with others.
2. Values Inventories-Values Inventories will help you to clarify and prioritize the things that are important to you and what motivates you.
3. Skill Inventories-Skill Inventories will help identify the abilities you have, what level of skill you possess, and what your preferences are in using those skills.
4. Interest Inventories-Interest Inventories will survey your interest, aptitudes, and preferences and match that data to occupations that are best suited to those elements.

When using career assessment inventories, please keep in mind the following:

1. No one test will have all the information you need nor will it be presented in a way that will appeal to everyone.
2. You should take several tests rather than just one.
3. Don’t give the test power over what your feelings, thoughts, and experiences have taught you about yourself.
4. Don’t forget that test will not be able to cover all the things that make you unique.
5. Test results will not tell us who we are and what we should be. Test at best can give indications of what could be or make suggestions worth following up. But if you’re asking them to do more than that, you’re asking too much.
6. Just reading the test results isn’t enough. You need to think long and hard about the information provided by the test.
7. Be as honest as possible about yourself in your responses to the questions being asked.

Once you have your career assessment results, it is important to meet with your counselor to review the results and check out our career center that offers thousands of occupations contained in computers, books, and in videotapes.

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