A good independent careers advisor will tell you that there are a number of important factors to consider when you come to choose the right career and a fully qualified career change advisor will understand the value of using psychometric tests to unearth your real talents.
The first factor to consider is to find a career that you are really interested in or passionate about. If you can do that you are much more likely to enjoy your career and succeed at it.
Next is to find a career that suits your personality – something that presses the right buttons in your heart and provides the perfect environment for you to be working in.
Then, you want a career that is in line with your values and beliefs. Some people want to work in a career that supports the cause they believe in – others need to avoid certain careers that would be against their principles.
But perhaps the most important factor of all is that you need to play to your strengths. You need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are so that you can harness them to realise the real potential in your ideal career. This is where career aptitude tests come in.
Career aptitude tests are cleverly designed to unearth your abilities. You can imagine that certain career paths prize certain abilities. If numbers are not a strength, don’t aspire to be an accountant. If your verbal reasoning is not good, don’t try to become a lawyer. If your spatial visualisation isn’t good, don’t aim for architecture.
If you are looking for career change advice in London, you should try Career Analysts. They are a firm of career change advisors, who conduct career aptitude tests as well as all the other psychometric tests listed above.
The psychometric tests are completed by you at home first. They will take you about 5 hours to complete as there are hundreds of questions. Additionally, they will ask you for lots of information about your background, education, what work you have done so far, if any, and some other personal information.
Once you have completed all the psychometrics and the career aptitude tests, you will meet one of their Occupational Psychologists face-to-face, one-on-one, and she will show you the results of the psychometric tests and explain what they mean to you. She will also have done her research into suitable careers for you so that you can discuss those options directly with her, aiming to help you decide what career path is right for you for the next (or first) stage of your career.
The results of the psychometric tests are shown in the form of graphs.
For example, the personality graph is a bipolar graph. One characteristic measuring your self-discipline shows ‘tolerates disorder, unexacting, flexible’ at one end of the spectrum. The other extreme shows as ‘perfectionist, organised, self-disciplined’. Different personality traits – each with opposites – are measured in this way.
The values graph measures your preferences for Aesthetic, Social, Material, Influence, Rational, and Beliefs as forces that motivate you.
The career aptitude tests measure numerical, verbal and perceptual reasoning, logic, mechanical understanding and spatial visualisation. It is not your overall level of success in these tests that is important but which of them you are better at than the others.
The interest questionnaire measures your preferences for six major categories of career and each one of these is further subdivided into five more specific groups.
In the consultation, you will discuss career paths that the Occupational Psychologist believes may be suitable and practical for you, based on the results of the psychometric tests. As you talk them through, you will be able to eliminate those that don’t appeal to you or are not suitable for whatever reason, until you are left with a very small number of career options that you can investigate further and make a final career decision.
The aim of their programme is to narrow down your career options and arm you with sufficient knowledge to confidently make the right career decision. Many people keep their personal career report for a lifetime so that it becomes a point of reference for years to come.
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