A Taiwanese friend wants to change job but isn’t sure what job/career would suit. Ten years ago in a careers guidance office in the UK (part of a Jobcentre, not the university careers office), I used a computer questionnaire.
It was very useful. It wasn’t psychometric, but asked a lot of questions which you had to grade from definitely yes through to definitely no. Example questions were; “Do you want to work in the open air?”, “Do you want to work in a variety of places” and a load of questions designed to find out what areas of work would be suitable.
The best bit was that at the end, it gave you a list of jobs graded by suitability; most suitable at the top. And they really were suitable; the questionnaire worked.
I’ve been searching for a couple of days to find something like this. I can find a load of psychometric tests but they’re not as useful; not so many relevant questions and too many different job suggestions, not graded by suitability. Can anyone help me find a decent online careers questionnaire? Thanks in advance.
Well I’ll answer my own question as it may be useful to others.
I found and downloaded a 30 day trial version of more or less the same software package I used in the careers office ten years ago. Updated version of course. It’s most relevant for jobs/career structures in the UK and in the west generally, but I think my friend will still find it very useful.
The two great things about it are;
1 As well as psychometric factors, the questions address a wide range of very practical issues.
2 After all the questions have been answered, the program comes up with your top 20 jobs arranged in descending order of “suitability”.
The program is Pathfinder and is available for free trial download from; progressions.co.uk
I see a great adult conversation class coming out of this!
On second thoughts, most of my students have never actually thought about what they want. They have generally ‘chosen’ their careers by default, and/or without any real thought.
Congratulations to your guy for breaking the mould.
PS I used the same system (I assume it was the same one) a long time ago. It told me to go into politics, which was rather funny as I was a party activist at the time but had already decided that I didn’t want to make a career out of it.
But it made me think about what I really wanted, what it was that I wanted a job to provide, rather than seeing the job itself as the important thing. A good thing, for sure.
[quote=“Loretta”]I see a great adult conversation class coming out of this![/quote]Good idea. Various possible ways to use it in language teaching. A helpful thing is that when you do one of the sections, a window to the left gives an easy-to-understand gloss of key terms.
Actually, there’s a lot of in there. I did a “trial run” with it and it took me at least twenty minutes, answering the questions quickly without a break. There’s at least a couple of lessons’ study material.