Free Career Assessment

This Career Assessment Will Take You a Little Longer, But It’s Worth It!

( You can download this as a pdf book)

This free career assessment is the best system that I know of to truly find out what your greatest gifts and abilities are.

It is a system that has been used worldwide for many years and has proven to be very accurate at helping you understand yourself in regard to the world of work.

It does take a little longer than some of the quick online career tests, but you won’t regret it.

Quality Takes a Little Longer

The past achievements that you will examine in this free career assessment are things that you have enjoyed doing and that in some way you felt you were good at.

This exercise involves looking back over your life for experiences that have brought tremendous satisfaction to you and then those achievements to discover which skills you used that were common among the different achievements.

There is nearly always a correlation between things we enjoy doing and things we are good at.
There are exceptions to this, but mostly this rule stands.

It is important in this exercise to distinguish between achievements where you felt you did well and enjoyed, as against those where other people thought you did well.
We are not interested, in whether other people thought you did well at it.
The final litmus test is “Did I enjoy it”.

Of course, there may well be accomplishments that you both enjoyed very much and other people thought you did well at.
But be careful to distinguish between these two aspects when working through this free career assessment.

What Sort of Achievements Are We Talking about?

These accomplishments may involve:

• projects at school
• things that you did as a child that you enjoyed
• work you did with volunteer groups during your spare time
• any jobs or parts of jobs you enjoyed during your working career

But they must be activities; things that you actually did rather than things you observed or were passive in.

For example, if I had a fun holiday at Christmas time, would not qualify.

However, if you wanted to use an example like this to explain how you planned and prepared for the holiday and how it involved setting up a savings fund, coordinating other people and resources, and the logistics of taking some specialist sporting equipment to the holiday location, then this type of example would be fine.

The key component is that the achievement must be something you actually did. Something that you were actively involved in.
[See example below.]

Everyone Has Something to Offer

Don’t be concerned if you feel you have never had opportunities like other people to achieve in life. It is still usual for these innate skills and abilities to show themselves no matter what your background, education, or upbringing.
This free career assessment should not disadvantage you if you feel you have not had many opportunities in life so far.

That is a very encouraging aspect of human design in relation to your inborn job skills. It means that not only was everybody born with inborn job skills, but everyone can identify some of these in themselves, despite their background.

It should be obvious to you as you work through this free career assessment when you identify one of these natural motivations.

It will usually bring excitement and passion and cause your heart to skip a beat as you visualize yourself in a role using these job skills. If at first, you cannot easily think of any past achievements that fit these criteria, do not think you are an exception in that there is nothing you are good at or really love to do.

Often, this may be simply because you have never taken the time to complete one of these free career assessments.

After completing this exercise, I’m sure you will no longer feel this way.
I don’t believe there is a person on earth who does not have some wonderful and unique abilities to offer the world.

Everyone Has Something to Offer – Case Study

A number of years ago while enrolled in a training program, I had the opportunity of being in contact with a Down’s syndrome boy. [I’ll call him: Rodney].
Rodney was in his early twenties but had the mental capability of someone many years younger.
Some may wonder what possible gifts or abilities would a person like Rodney have to offer. It soon became apparent that not only did he possess a valuable talent, but it was one which I have not seen so strongly exhibited before in another person.
When he used this gift, he dramatically benefited the recipients and others around him.
It was something he did naturally without even knowing, but I’m sure others could see what I saw in him. What was this ability?
Rodney had an unusual knack for diminishing tension among people.
When conversations got a bit heated, he would often arrive on the scene where some conflict was brewing and with only one or two comments, he was able to destroy the tense atmosphere and reduce tension amongst those present.
I noticed that it immediately caused the people involved to take a step back and see things from a more balanced perspective.
Attitudes immediately changed and a sense of relative peace took over. Rodney carried a joy for living which often put me to shame.
He loved his simple life and his gifting allowed others to reassess the often wasted energy involving trivial conflicts with other people.

Free Career Assessment Exercise: Step 1

Many people find it helpful when looking back over their lives for enjoyable activities, to break down their past life into blocks.

In the table below we have used five-year periods.
[If you are under 25 years old you may find it easier to use 2 to 3-year periods, for example, fit it to your own circumstances].

The purpose of the table is to simply help you remember your enjoyable activities.

Once you have remembered them, then we will begin to investigate them more fully.

WE ARE ALL BLESSED WITH GOD GIVEN TALENTS.
MINE JUST HAPPENS TO BE BEATING PEOPLE UP

SUGAR RAY LEONARD US OLYMPIC CHAMPION AND PROFESSIONAL BOXER

If you have a fantastic memory and don’t feel you need this table to jog your memory, then don’t bother with it however do try to select achievements from different periods in your life.

Ideally, you would need 3 to 4 different activities for each time frame.

These activities can be from any area of your life, education, work, or leisure so long as they were enjoyable to you.

Free Career Assessment Exercise: Step 2

Before You Discover You Have To Explore

Once you are confident you have a good number of achievements to work with, go back through your achievements column and choose one achievement you felt you enjoyed the most.

Write out your answers to the following five questions about that achievement.
When answering these questions, err on the side of giving lots of detail, rather than not enough.

You will see later that the more you can relive about the achievement and provide significant detail, the more beneficial it will be to identify your inborn job skills in the next step.
[See example below]

An Example of the Sort of Thing You Could Write:

When I was 23 years old, I owned a two-store video business that had become quite successful.
Once I was asked by the father of a local students club if I would be willing to be the keynote speaker at one of their breakfast meetings to explain how my business had become successful and some general keys to success in life. This was a group of highly motivated young students who had decided that life was to be fully lived.
They were bright, goal-setting, achievement-oriented leaders of the future in our city. When I was asked to speak at this breakfast meeting, I became very excited.
I have always had a passion to impart to people and in particular young people a positive, success-oriented outlook on life.
I was, at that time also leading a church youth group and was equally passionate about how I could make a difference in these young people’s lives. I immediately began to draft out some notes on the speech that I would give.
I spent quite some time determining what were the most important things this young group of people needed to know.
I drew information from a current goal-setting program that I was working on as well as information from a number of books I had read on success, goal setting, leadership, and the Bible. Once I had the key elements of my speech prepared, I began to add to my talk by including examples and analogies that fitted the points I wanted to make.
When I was comfortable that the speech notes were complete, I began practicing the delivery of the speech by writing out and memorizing the key points from 4×4 cards. I repeated this exercise, a number of times in the days leading up to the meeting and I repeatedly timed my talk to ensure I would fit inside the allotted breakfast session. Like anybody giving a talk in front of people, I was nervous when it came to the day. However, once I began, my nerves disappeared and in place, my emotions transformed into high energy and passion.
I remember in the midst of my talk how much I was enjoying it and how much the students were receiving and responding to areas I was strongly encouraging them in. I particularly remember the sense of elation at the end of the talk.
It is hard to comprehend that this much excitement and sense of fulfillment could be accomplished by simply delivering a speech to a group of students.
But as I began to understand my motivations I could see that the fulfillment and satisfaction came from the opportunity to positively influence people to their maximum potential. And because this particular group of students was hungry for life’s success strategies, it was a win-win situation for both parties. They enjoyed receiving and I enjoyed giving. The whole exercise was an absolute delight for me, and of course, this was not something I was being paid for.

Free Career Assessment Exercise: Step 3

The Five Questions to Answer About Your Achievements

1. What introduced you to this activity? What thoughts or ideas motivated you to attempt it?

2. List everything you actually did during this activity.

3. Include references to any other people who helped you and why and how you enlisted their help.
Did you enjoy working with them?
What sort of people were they? Include any particular information you had to obtain, research, etc. either from books, online, people, or any other source.

4. What was the final result? How did you feel when you finished and what did you learn from the activity?

5. What was it that you found particularly enjoyable or satisfying? Were there some particular parts of the achievement that you enjoyed most?

When you have finished, mark the page number 1.

Then complete the other seven achievements starting with your second most enjoyable achievement, then your third, and so on until you have completed eight.

Number each page you do for easy reference.
You could do more or less than eight achievements if you wanted to.
However, eight seems to be a minimum number to uncover a good cross-section of skills. Do more than eight if you feel to.

The figure is already there, I simply cast away the stone that covers it

Michelangelo about creating magnificent monuments

Once you get started, you’ll probably find you enjoy reliving these precious moments. For most people, this is a very rewarding and enjoyable exercise.
The hardest part is usually getting started.

Many years ago when I first completed this career assessment exercise, they dramatically increased my self-worth and my understanding of who I am in regards to the world of work.

Finding out your inborn job skills is the foundation for a successful job search and a successful career.
A builder will tell you that laying the foundation of a house that he is about to build is the most difficult and time-consuming stage of the project.
Even when he is finished there is not much to see despite much hard work being put in.

But if the builder tries to shortcut the foundations and minimize this critical component of the building, this is the day he will go out of business.

Free Career Assessment Exercise: Step 4

Uncovering Your Inborn Job Skills

Now we need to analyze each of your activities to discover which of your inborn job skills you are most motivated in.

[Any skill that you have identified in any one of your achievements will be regarded from here on as a “job skill”]

To complete this next step, you will need to download and print off the free career assessment job skills sheets.

They need to be printed off because you will use the checkboxes to work out your top job skills. Once you have printed these off, take the first activity you wrote about.

Using the free career assessment job skills sheets you have just printed out, place a check in the number 1. box next to every skill you used in this first achievement.

Check the box even if it was only a small part of your activity.

You’ll notice that the three job skills lists are marked “things”, “people” and “information”.
All job skills fall into one of these three areas.
Make sure you claim all the skills you legitimately can.

May I gently warn you that many people fall down in this area?
They shy away from claiming job skills that they have in fact used, but perhaps they feel that others demonstrate a higher level use of the skill, they don’t mark it down.

Another person may have used a different degree of skill from yours, but this is not about comparing one person to the other.
It is simply about you and the skills you have used.

Please do not fall into this trap of not claiming a skill you have in fact used.
Claim it if you can.

After you have analyzed achievement number one in this way, go through the other seven achievements and do the same for each one.

Then add across all the job skills rows and write the total number of checks in the ‘Totals’ column. When you’re finished, you may notice that you have used the same skills in many of your achievements.

What are your top-rated skills based on the total number of checks?

It is also interesting to note what proportions are associated with things or people or information.

Have a look to see if the job skills with the most checks are those that you truly like the most — it is possible they may not be.

If they are not, maybe the stories you chose were not good examples.

You may feel the other skills that got fewer ticks are in fact your favorite skills.
If that’s the case write some more stories which show up the skills you like the most so that there is some evidence of those skills being used.

You will also notice that there is a provision in the skill sheets to add some of your own detailed job skills descriptions.

You may well identify very specific skills which are not listed on the sheets.
Please add these in.
These sometimes can be your most used and enjoyed skills.

Free Career Assessment Exercise: Step 5

Adding Depth to Your Skills Description

You now have a list of ten job skills in a brief format, but to add depth to your skills toolbox, we need to expand most of the skills a little further so that your free career assessment can be most effective.

Take each job skill and in your own words add a sentence or two so the skill is made more personal for you.

You may even like to rework the original skill so you feel more comfortable with the language being used and how it relates to you and the way you used this skill.

For example, if one of your top ten job skills was: “producing, creating, formulating or devising original ideas or concepts”, Then your amended job skills description could be:

“being innovative, discovering new ideas particularly where an opportunity exists for making money or encouraging young people to greater heights, being able to see how a concept or idea could be transferred successfully to another application”

You will see that the more details you have, the more defined and clarified your job skills becomes both on paper and in your mind.

It’s in your mind that we ultimately want them, so when it comes to job interview day they will be easily remembered and articulated to an employer.

You may find a thesaurus or other language tool useful at this point to create the most accurate description of what your job skills are.

After your top ten skills have been prioritized and expanded ask yourself this question:

Is my number one skill something I feel powerfully motivated to use? Does it tug on my heart when I imagine myself using it?

If the answer is no, consider some of your other top ten skills. Your top three or four job skills will be the ones that you need to focus on from here.

You now should have a reasonable understanding of where your heart lies in relation to your natural inborn motivations.

To achieve a real sense of significance and satisfaction in your work, it is imperative that you only consider job opportunities that primarily use the abilities you have identified in your inborn job skills assessment.

Remember that if you are in a job where your strongest passions, motivations, and job skills are being utilized, you will be substantially more fulfilled than if you are in any old job.

If you need help with any aspect of completing this free career assessment or help with interpreting its results, please contact me.

For full details on my services, costs, etc. please see my services page.