You are hesitating about a professional direction, and the idea of a test that would show you the way is appealing. A career test can indeed inform your choices, as long as you know what it measures and what it doesn’t. Properly understood, this is a useful starting point. Taken for an oracle, he disappoints.
This article explains what a career test is, what it is based on, what it can do for you and where its limits are.
What a career test measures
An orientation test does not guess your ideal job. It measures your professional interests, i.e. the types of activities and environments to which you are spontaneously attracted. From there, it identifies job families that are consistent with what you like to do.
This measure is most often based on a model that groups interests into six major families, known as RIASEC. Each corresponds to a way of approaching work: the concrete and the technical, the analysis and the research, the creation, the contact and the help, the persuasion and the initiative, the organization and the rigor. Most people identify with two or three of these families, and it is this combination, that of the six major occupational interest profiles, that creates a profile.
What an orientation test does for you
The first contribution of an orientation test is to put words to what attracts you. Many people have a confused idea of what interests them, without ever having formulated it clearly. Seeing one’s interests organized and named helps to see more clearly.
The second contribution is to broaden the field. A good test doesn’t just confirm the trades you were already thinking about. It brings up leads that are consistent with your profile that you wouldn’t have thought of, because you didn’t know about them or didn’t feel authorized to consider them. This is often where the test is most valuable, especially in retraining, when it comes to opening doors rather than closing them.
What an orientation test does not do
Remaining lucid about limits is part of a serious use. An orientation test does not decide for you. He enlightens, he does not decide. The results are a basis for reflection, not a sentence, and they benefit from being confronted with reality: information on the professions, exchanges with professionals, concrete tests when possible.
A test also doesn’t take into account your entire situation. Your level of training, your personal constraints, the job market near you do not fit into a questionnaire of interests. These elements count as much as your interests in a career decision, and they are dealt with outside of the test.
A fair way to look at an orientation test: it indicates directions consistent with what attracts you, not a single job engraved for life. It opens up a range of avenues, it’s up to you to explore those that take into account your reality.
Interests and personality: two complementary measures
Your interests tell what you’re drawn to. They don’t tell you how you work, which is just as important in a job. Two people attracted by the same activities can flourish in opposite contexts depending on their need for a setting, calm or contact.
This is why an orientation test benefits from being completed by a reading of your personality. Crossing the two gives a finer image than each taken alone and allows you to get to know each other better to orient yourself well. This is the approach that Solivalis takes: measure your professional interests and your personality, then read the two together.
Where to start
The easiest way to see what an orientation test can teach you is to take it. You can take the test for free and discover the families of professions consistent with your interests, without anything being decided for you.
