Career Tests: worth their weight in gold
What do I want to be when I grow up?
Students: adults twice your age are asking this question! However, the question should be: What am I best suited for? Many adults have not answered this question either. The kicker is, many of us are not even ASKING the question — What am I best suited for? – we are simply trying to choose a direction in life/job/career without taking time to find this out.
True Story: My 23-year-old niece spent 4-years attending a fabulously-expensive 4-year private college and got a wonderful education in Biology with an emphasis in Research. She was excited to be selected for a job interning in a highly-selective research lab studying mosquitoes (they live in Georgia). After one-month in this high-paying job, she was about to go stir-crazy. She was adequately trained for the position, it was close to home, paid well … but she failed to take into account she is a “people person”. There were some days that her entire shift would pass and she would not see or speak to one other person. Death to an extrovert. She left the job within a month and is planning on graduate school to move her career in a different direction within the field of Biology.
Could her path been a bit clearer and straighter? Maybe!
I recommend all students 7th grade and above take an online career assessment and even a personality test. In fact, I recommend they take at least three since questions can be phrased differently and different answers might sway the results. Besides being fun, they really are insightful. It may help you choose a career direction or help you decide if you should pursue an internship, job shadow or take college courses in some areas you haven’t thought of.
Posted on April 8, 2011, in High School to-do's and tagged career planning, career tests, High school, homeschool. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
I wish I had read more job descriptions before choosing a course of study. What excites us in the classroom doesn’t always translate to the job. For one thing, no one checks up on you or gives you a midterm grade or holiday breaks. They tell you what to do, how they want it done, and expect to see results that sometimes take weeks to get. There is just that basic difference between student and employee.
I too have a research biology degree. Some of the job descriptions were 50% time looking into microscope – that means not talking to anyone for hours. I realized once I had been doing the same 3 week cycle of extractions for 26 weeks; I had gotten so efficient I was overlapping cycles. I quit counting after that! Research has an under lying need to repeat experiments over and over. This process takes years. The exciting parts represent years of mistakes and wrong turns and negative results; student labs are set up for success.
I was able to thrive on the precision and technical details of what I did. But later, I found that career focus was not as compatible with motherhood as I had hoped. Patients and sample timings are not interested in your childcare arrangements or a family get together. If I had broadened my degree to include a clinical certification, I would have had more career options that were more flexible in timing and location. Someone tried to tell me this once but I didn’t understand. Look at related careers for options that might better fit your personal goals. I recommend nursing and dental hygiene; both require technical skill but are very flexible while paying well.