Online quizzes are really good ways to burn free time when you’re bored at the office. How else would we find the answers to such elusive questions like what “Twilight” character you embody, or what kind of dinosaur you would be?
If you have any experience with them, you know the majority are pointless and funny but you’d be surprised to find out that some of them are actually useful. For the thousands of millennials who wrestle with the timeless question of “what do I want to do when I grow up?” a Career Quiz might be the solution for you. Here are some of the most useful quizzes on the web and why they might actually help you find your lifelong career.
While this quiz won’t tell you whether you should be a neurosurgeon or a chemical engineer, it will tell you a lot more about your personality than you may care to know. The Big Five is a personality quiz that’s been used for some time and does a great deal of breaking your personality up into five parts.
At the end of the quiz it’ll give you a recap of how you score in five different departments of personality. With this information you can form a plan around what kind of career you’d want to pursue. For instance, if you scored really high in both openness and agreeableness, there’s a good chance you’d thrive as a social worker or in another setting where you are engaging and helping people. This isn’t a permanent timeline for your future though. In different times in your life, you’re likely going to score differently on The Big Five. However you score, make sure that you take the results in a positive way and associate it with a potential career.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the most serious personality test used by companies to determine not only what kind of role someone should potentially have, but how to best work within that role. Not a free test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator costs $50.00 to take but will give you a comprehensive overview of crucial aspects of your working personality.
For an organization ,the Myers-Briggs Type indicator can be used to determine an employee’s skills like time management, problem solving, decision making, and dealing with stress. By having this information readily available you can make sure that you are promoting an environment or department that will suit your employees’ needs. As the employee, you can use this information to find a role that suits your personality perfectly, or potentially switch careers if you realize that your personality inherently interferes with your ability to do a good job.
My Next Move O*NET Interests Profiler
Who says the government never did anything for us? This online quiz was created by the Department of Labor and is a pretty comprehensive test specifically for employment. The 60-question test will ask you to rate job-oriented tasks in order to get an assessment for what kind of career might be good for you. For instance, it’ll ask “do you like building furniture?” and you reply by strongly liking or disliking the task on a sliding scale.
At the end of the test it will give you a personality profile like the other tests and you can determine a relative industry based upon what you score highly in. Once you get past that portion, it will ask you how much preparation you can possibly put into your desired career. If you are in college, or don’t mind going for a higher-level degree, then your “zone” will be higher, thus giving you more opportunities for a variety of jobs.
Once you finish that, it will direct you to a screen with some careers and more information on what the jobs are. While you don’t want an online quiz to determine what you’ll do for the rest of your life, the O*NET Interests Profiler can give you a better idea of some practical jobs that fit your desires.
While an online quiz will never be able to 100% accurately tell you what career you should pursue, it can give you a good idea of what you are good at, and what you can strive for. If you’re totally clueless on where you want to go in the future, taking an online quiz will give you a good start.
