Career Self-Assessment

A Self-Assessment, otherwise known as a Self-Audit or Personal Inventory, is essentially the process of reflecting inwardly to take stock of what makes you who you are, up to this point.

Self-assessment is the first step in career planning and means finding out more about what you want from work. It includes analysing your values, skills and interests to find out what you want from your career. Your goal is to find the role(s), throughout your career, that match up with as many of your personal attributes as possible.

A typical Self-Assessment will typically cover the following questions:

1. Who am I? (your personality type, key characteristics, motivational drives, needs, and attitudes)
2. What do I Value? (the things that are important to you, that make life feel meaningful)
3. What are my Strengths? (an ability or skill you enjoy using, frequently and are energized by its use)
4. What am I Interested in? (what you enjoy spending time on, directing time and attention to)

Self-Assessment is vital because it helps you keep track of any updates to your skills, enhancements in strengths, changes in preferences or interests and developments in perspective and personality that can have an impactful, even life changing effect on the career path being pursued. Catching these changes as soon as possible, can prevent spending years achieving career goals which no longer hold meaning or satisfaction.

At any one time, only 20 percent of employed people are in their best suited job, there are 40 percent who are close to their best suited job and the other 40 percent are in the wrong job (Solly 2017).

Therefore, the better you understand your motivations throughout your career, the better you can spot a job that satisfies you. And keep this in mind: What you're chasing today might not be the same in a year or two.

Self-assessment offers:

• Insights and greater self-awareness of your preferences and motivations
• Find out about your personal qualities including strengths and weaknesses.
• Help to build on your personal branding
• Learn about occupations that are a good match for you
• Decide where you need more training or experience
• Identify the skills you bring to a job
• Consider careers or roles you may not have thought about before
• Identify your achievements, graduate/employment skills and things that will help you succeed.
• Record your achievements to keep track of your successes
• Help you to write your application forms, more personal, detailed resumes and cover letters and to prepare for the sorts of questions you may be asked at interview

The Golden Rule of Self-Assessment is Self-Honesty. Throughout our lives we’ll have been told by parents, guardians, teachers, even by our employers and professional associations of the need to be honest. Many of us were brought up on the old Benjamin Franklin quote that “Honesty is the best policy”. However, all of that stresses the importance of being honest in our interactions with others. However, the art of Self-Honesty, is where we turn inward to take an objective view of ourselves.

The main challenges with assessing your own ability are bias, or blaming external factors, so at every stage, bring it back to you as much as possible, to your actions and your choices. The ability to self-assess means being honest with yourself, having the intellectual courage to face hard truths about yourself. Being able to self-assess and understand the deficiencies - and just as importantly, the strengths - in your career is crucial in working out what is required to make progress as you move forward.

1. What are my interests?
2. What are my skills?
3. What are the best skills and abilities I should possess to become successful?
4. What are my talents and strengths?
5. What is my personality?
6. What difficult situations have I faced and how did I deal with it?
7. Did that experience in any way affect my personality?
8. Which have been my best moments in life so far?
9. What have been my biggest mistakes? What have I learned from them?
10. Which past experiences am I most thankful for?
11. If I could turn back time, what would I do differently? Why?
12. What’s the most exciting thing I've ever experienced?
13. What’s the most spontaneous thing I've ever done? How did it make me feel?
14. Which things felt important to me ten years ago no longer matter to me now?
15. What are my top values?

These tools will NOT tell you what career or position is the perfect match but they will help you gain insight about yourself so that you can articulate what is important to you, focus your job search, and assist you in evaluating options.

PERSONALITY

- Big Five Personality Test

https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test

- The Enneagram

https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test

-Personality Colour Test

http://www.testcolor.com/personalitytest/personalitytest.php

- DISC Personality Test

https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/

VALUES

- Personal Values

https://personalvalu.es/

- Personal Values Assessment

https://www.valuescentre.com/tools-assessments/pva/

STRENGTHS

- Personality Strengths Inventory

https://www.truity.com/test/personal-strengths-inventory

CAREER INTERESTS

- Holland Code Career Test

https://www.truity.com/test/holland-code-career-test

- Career Personality Profiler

https://www.truity.com/test/career-personality-profiler-test

- Career Aptitude Test

https://www.123test.com/career-test/

- O Net Online

https://www.onetonline.org/explore/interests/