tools to figure out your ideal career
Why do personality and aptitude tests work?
Personality tests aren’t always career-related, but they can help you get a baseline handle on who you are, what you like, and what circumstances can help you thrive (or, alternatively, what your biggest challenges might be). All of these things are crucial for helping you figure out a long-term path. They also support a fundamental truth about professional life: you can have all the education and skills necessary to do a job, but whether you do it well—and whether it is fulfilling for you—is largely due to your personality. Your personality is often the forgotten part of the job hunt, lost in the shuffle with resume, cover letter, and interview prep. Yet it’s a major component of who you are, and who you’d be on the job.
Similarly, aptitude tests may help you define skill sets you didn’t realize you had, or didn’t know that you should emphasize. A little self-knowledge can go a long way, especially when it comes to finding a career path that works for you in the long run.
Let’s look at a few of the assessments out there.
The Color Quiz
Believe it or not, your favorite colors can show what careers might be right for you. In this simple, five-minute quiz, your answers are analyzed and returned as potential career matches.
Cost: Free to use and get your results.
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Assessment
This is the classic personality test, used in many different professional and personal contexts to help people become more self-aware and make decisions based on their personal strength areas. It’s a questionnaire (which you can fill out either online or on paper) designed to assess how you see the world in four different areas: directing and receiving energy (extroverted vs. introverted); taking in information (sensing vs. intuitive); making decisions (thinking vs. feeling); and approaching the outside world (judging vs. perceiving). It reveals insights about how you form and approach relationships, as well as how you communicate—both factors that can help determine whether you become, say, a lab technician versus a stand-up comedian.
Cost: Insights don’t always come for free. The official test is $49.95, but there are also free versions available online as well. As part of the cost, you receive a detailed report analyzing your personality type and communication styles.
Truity TypeFinder Tests
Truity bases their personality assessments on the 16 different types originally outlined by Isabel Briggs Myers (whose name should sound familiar if you just read about the MBTI). They offer a general personality test (the TypeFinder Personality Test), but also a professionally-focused one (the TypeFinder for the Workplace). There are also smaller, targeted personality quizzes available on the site.
Cost: The general TypeFinder assessments (both personality and professional) are $29 apiece, but you can take the shorter personality quizzes on the site for free.
Pymetrics
If games are more your speed than filling out straight-up questionnaires, then Pymetrics might be a more fun way for you to learn more about your personal and professional styles. The Pymetrics method uses game design to help limit anxiety and biases that might be present in more traditional quizzes and surveys, allowing people to relax and make honest choices instead of overthinking or trying to figure out how to “score high” on a standardized test. At the end of the process, the Pymetrics reports match job seekers with a subset of potential careers based on neuroscience and their algorithms. This new wave of personality assessment is used by schools and many different kinds of companies to assess potential applicants and recruits.
Cost: It’s free to sign up and start playing the games, but there may be costs for detailed reporting and career matchmaking.
The MAPP Career Assessment
This assessment is a 22-minute “test” (flashback to those No. 2 pencils and scantron sheets!) that asks you 71 questions about your likes and dislikes to gauge your potential career interests. The focus is less on the “right” answer than on the instinctive one. This test bills itself as the “mapp” to your “true calling.” And unlike those old-school pencil-and-paper affairs, this can be done entirely online.
Cost: It’s free to get started and take the test, but it costs $89.95-$149.95 to get detailed reports and potential job analyses
Sokanu
Sokanu takes your answers from a 20-minute quiz, and compares your interests, personality, and preferences to 100 different traits. At the end of the test, you’re matched to a subset of 800 different jobs. Rather than make general recommendations like “astronaut” or “ballet dancer,” this test prides itself on using deeper data metrics to make specific career recommendations.
Cost: Totally free!
My Next Move
This is a very career-focused assessment put out by the U.S. Department of Labor. Also called the “O*Net Interest Profiler,” this test allows you to take your results and use them to search the U.S. government’s vast database of career information.
Cost: This tool is free to use (well, probably funded by your tax dollars—but no additional cost in the meantime).
Skills Profiler
If you’re looking for something more solidly skills-based than personality-based, the U.S. Department of Labor’s other career assessment, the Skills Profiler tool, might be a better fit for you. Instead of taking a personality type and matching it with a job, it lets you input either your current skills to find a matching career, or a job type to see what kind of skills you’ll need for it. This can be a good way to see if that job you want to apply for is a good fit for the skills you already have, or if you’ll need to do some building in the meantime.
Cost: This assessment is free to use.
PathSource
PathSource is a little different—instead of telling you which jobs you should pursue based on your personality or interests, it helps you figure out what kind of job you’ll need to support your lifestyle. It’s an app that assesses your personality and career interests, and also lets you know whether that job in library science is likely to support your caviar dreams. Or, more importantly, whether you’ll be able to pay back the student loans you accumulated in pursuit of your goals.
Cost: The app is free to download from the Apple or Google app stores.
THE PRINCETON REVIEW CAREER QUIZ
This 24-question quiz asks users to answer all questions as if each career choice held the same pay and prestige to get truthful answers. Questions ask users to choose between two positions, such as “I would rather be a tax lawyer” or “I would rather be a newspaper editor.” Other questions include choosing between “I like to bargain to get a good price” and “I don’t like to have to bargain to get a good price.”
The quiz results will show you careers that match the “style” and “interest” colors you created. The four colors, red, green, blue, and yellow, represent Expediting, Communication, Planning, and Administrating. Once it tells you which style and interest your results produced, the website goes on to provide a list of recommended careers based on your interest and preferred work style.
Take the Princeton Review Career Quiz
O*NET INTEREST PROFILER
The assessment known as the O*Net Interest Profiler is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and guides users through understanding their interests and explaining how they relate to the world of work. It asks users to rate their answers to questions such as “I would enjoy painting sets for a play” with “Strongly Dislike” to “Strongly Like.” The website also prefaces the assessment with the instructions “try not to think about if you have enough education or training to do the work or how much money you would make. Just think about if you would like or dislike doing the work.”
This assessment contains 60 questions and moves fairly quickly. It provides a score for each of the six categories assessed in the Holland model; Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. It shows which three categories you scored highest in and allows users to click through to learn about what career categories people with that personality trait do well in.
Take the O*Net Interest Profiler assessment
Explore Careers Based on Holland Codes
MYERS-BRIGGS PERSONALITY TEST
Along with performing a SWOT analysis on yourself, understanding your own personality traits and what those mean for your ideal workplace is important. Things like being an extroverted introvert may mean that you would thrive in an office with cubicles as opposed to working remotely or in an open-air office. This can be done with the popular Myers-Briggs personality test. There are multiple versions available online, but we’ve linked one of the unofficial, free ones below that is 54 questions long.
This assessment asks a question and prompts you to answer it on a scale of “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.”
You can also use your four-letter code to research which careers best fit that mix of personality traits!
Take the 16 Personalities Assessment
List of Career Ideas for Myers Brigg Personality Results
CAREER ONESTOP SKILLS MATCHER
This assessment is slightly different than the other personality assessments featured. The CareerOneStop Skills Matcher asks users to rate their levels on 40 key workplace skills and provides career options that match the determined skills.
Questions in this assessment state skills such as “Clerical” and ask users to choose their skill level between “Beginner: File Forms” and “Skilled: Type 30 words per minute” and “Expert: design an online office-wide storage system.”
The results of your skills assessment will provide information on what careers you match with, the annual wage for each career, the education level needed, and the long-term outlook for the career.
We recommend using this assessment in conjunction with one of the personality assessments to best determine which career you are both interested in and for which you are well qualified in order to increase your likelihood of landing a job and succeeding long-term.
Take the CareerOneStop Skills Matcher
CAREER APTITUDE TEST (BASED ON HOLLAND CODE PERSONALITY TYPES)
The Career Aptitude Test gives users insight into their job personalities. This assessment not only tells you which careers may suit you well but the type of office environment that will help you succeed.
This assessment’s format is choosing your favorite and least favorite job prompts between a set of four pictures. There are 15 of these prompts. A set of four options may include, “Going to the office, research job, construction, and engineering, or creative photography.”
When you’ve finished the assessment, you will get a read-out of your personality type based on Holland Codes. The six personality types in the Holland model are Realistic, Investigative, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional.
Take the Career Aptitude Test
Explore Careers Based on Holland Codes
SWOT ANALYSIS
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A SWOT analysis helps you learn about yourself so you can identify a job that fits your skill set. Additionally, a SWOT analysis will identify external factors that may impact your career choice. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors while opportunities and threats are external factors. Here are some of the questions you might ask yourself to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats:
- Strengths: What skills do I have? What am I interested in? What sort of environment do I thrive in?
- Weaknesses: What subjects do I do poorly in? What am I scared of? What do I not enjoy? What tasks do I shy away from?
- Opportunities: In what environment do I work the hardest? How am I best motivated?
- Threats: Do I bring any risks to an organization? Why might a company not want to hire me?
An in-depth SWOT analysis can help you determine what benefits you may bring to a potential employer and areas in which you can focus on improving.
Performing a SWOT analysis on yourself will help you first create a better understanding of yourself. When you understand which career path you want to follow, it will also help you gauge what environment is best. This may be a small, medium, or large company or even those that allow remote vs. in-person working.
Self-assessment
Self-assessments assume that you know yourself better than any test could. Self-assessments rely on personal reflection to identify interests and skills in a particular field. There are many ways to complete a self-assessment:
- Writing: Write about what you picture when you think of a workplace. Are there other people around? Are you outside? What time is it? Use your imagination to determine what your ideal job looks like.
- Worksheets: Self-assessment worksheets and workbooks provide questions to guide reflection. These can help you focus your thinking and assist you in identifying what you might like to do as a job.
- Shadowing: Ask friends or family if you can shadow them at work for a day. Reflect on what you liked or did not like about their workplace and job duties to help you determine what job is the best fit for you.
Read about different careers and see which ones appeal to you. There are many ways to research career and job opportunities, but the easiest is a tool like Indeed's Career Guide. It allows you to explore many career paths quickly to ascertain what interests you and plot a path to establishing that career.
Community resources
Many communities offer career planning tools through workshops, seminars, websites, and publications. Public libraries are an excellent community resource for those interested in career planning. Libraries offer books, magazines, and computers for research. Libraries and community centers may also provide community workshops on career planning. Your local county's unemployment office also has a variety of career planning resources
Assessment: What’s Your Curiosity Profile?
Curiosity is the basis for the kind of “learner’s mindset” that’s needed for success in a changing world. Companies want people who ask smart questions, who explore new ideas and solutions, and who are eager to grow. This assessment can help you examine your own curiosity profile, measuring three key areas: Unconventionality, Intellectual Hunger, and Experiential Curiosity. The assessment itself is scientifically validated and based on extensive research. Try it and see where you rate on each of the key measures and how your own score compares to those of other assessment takers...
Assessment: Are You in Danger of Becoming Obsolete?
Research shows that the biggest worry most people have at work is that they’ll become obsolete — that their skills won’t hold up over time or even that they’ll lose their jobs, or the best assignments, to savvier up-and-comers (or robots). This assessment will help you determine your risk level and offer some practical, concrete things you can work on to help future-proof your career.
A Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals in 4 Steps
According to research, we fail to achieve our goals 50% of the time. But motivational science shows that phrasing your goals as if/then statements can increase the likelihood of reaching them. If/then statements prompt action by taking advantage of how our brains are wired. Stating “If it’s Monday morning, then I will sit down and plan out my week” creates a trigger in your brain so that when it is Monday morning, you automatically know that it’s time to plan your week. This tool breaks down the process of goal setting using if/then statements into 4 steps. While it’s designed for individual use, it can also be helpful for teams to walk through it together.
Assessment: Is It Time to Rethink Your Career?
Research shows that our lives alternate between periods of stability and transition. For many people, midlife or midcareer is the most turbulent time of all. Once you’ve achieved a certain measure of success, you may be asking yourself whether you want more of the same or something different—and whether your work allows you sufficient room to experiment. This assessment will help you figure out whether you’re ready for a change, or whether you should stay put and make the most of your current situation, with practical steps for moving forward when the time is right.