What kinds of Career assessments are there?
What is career assessment?
Career assessments are tools that are designed to help individuals understand how a variety of personal attributes (i.e., data values, preferences, motivations, aptitudes and skills), impact their potential success and satisfaction with different career options and work environments. Career assessments have played a critical role in career development.
There is a number of different kinds of career assessments: type assessments, game assessments, and adaptive assessments.
Type career assessments
Type career assessments are assessments that set a series of criteria, known as a type, and then assess people to identify which type they fit in. Type career assessments are often accessible and easy to understand but are often viewed as superficial and statistically inconsistent. Famous type career assessments include the Myer-Briggs Type assessment, The Holland Code Type assessment, and the DISC profile assessment.
Type assessments can be difficult for many audiences, objectives, and environments because they often require a high degree of self-awareness, career experience, and ample opportunity for debriefing with a trained counselor. The required debrief time is inherent to the concept of a type of career assessment because many people will not fit perfectly within the type and will need to work through how the information relates to them. Type career assessments are often not seen as particularly engaging because they are static which means that every user will see the same questions, often in the same order.
The strengths of type career assessments:
- Easy to understand for the user and counselor
- Well established
The weaknesses of type career assessments:
- Can be boring for users
- Superficial results and matching
- Poor user experience
- Expensive
- Aren’t specific to the person
Game career assessments
Game-based career assessments are neuroscience-based interactive exercises that use behavior to assess cognitive and personality traits. These assessments can be difficult to administer because they often require more Flash and other software that may not already be installed on people’s devices. Game-based career assessments to be engaging, especially for younger audiences but the objective of the games often do not align with career
The strengths of Game-Based career assessments:
- Novel and intriguing to users
- Eliminates the need for self-reporting
The weaknesses of game career assessments:
- Requires a computer, tablet, or phone to complete
- Requires internet connection
- Relatively new, requiring counselors to adjust to them
- Identities mostly behavior components which are not strong indicators of career fit
Adaptive career assessments
Adaptive career assessments are digital instruments that learn and adapt to the user, choosing the next question for the user to see based on their previous answers. Adaptive career assessments are generally more engaging for users to take as the process is more individualized. This type of career assessment excels at making up for a lack of debriefing opportunity as they promote self-reflection during the process of taking the assessment. Adaptive career assessments are often able to adapt to their audience to ensure the content, questions, and matching is appropriate for the user.
The strengths of adaptive career assessments:
- More engaging than other career assessments
- Individualized to the user
- Shorter than other career assessments
- Promotes self-reflection during the assessment through more specific follow up questions
- Increased specificity in results and in matching
The weaknesses of adaptive career assessments:
- Requires a computer, tablet, or phone to complete
- Requires internet connection
- Relatively new, requiring counselors to adjust to them