Search Results for: career change statistics

With the glut of free online career tests, it would be easy to get excited about the seemingly magical results they seek to provide to a persons career search.

But are they effective?
One of the attractions of them is that they can be fun to complete and provide presumably quick answers for someone seeking career change advice.

However, there are problems on a number of fronts when a person completes one of these assessments.

Results of such tests provide a list of careers* that supposedly suit a person’s personality type and thereby assist them in finding a career that they will enjoy.

As a career counselor who has in the past used a number of these instruments with clients, experience has now led me away from using them because:

1. A career aptitude test contradicts one of the core principals of career counseling.

2. A career placement test usually produces substandard results for a client compared to other career assessment methods.

3. Career assessment testing tends to minimize a person’s uniqueness in the world of work.

4. There may be ethical issues around the financial benefits career counselors receive when using a career personality test.

5. Relying on a career assessment test in this way is part of a general trend towards quick-fix solutions to people’s problems.

6. There is growing support for the removal of career testing among respected career counselors.

* This page information refers only to career tests that provide a list of careers or job types with the results of the test.
Other assessments which only provide general information about personality type or a person’s motivations and do not provide a list of job types can be useful.

HOW TO FIND OUT WHAT JOB YOU ARE BEST AT

It is difficult to identify our own natural abilities and then connect that with a job that suits you.

Here is an example from my own life of how unpredictable it can be…

At the age of twenty-two, I stumbled upon a sport that I became relatively good at.

On a couple of occasions, I managed to finish in the top fifteen place-getters in three world championships. The sport was racing rally cars (Subaru in my case).

To be quite frank it didn’t make sense that I was any good at it because rallying involved fine skills and fast reaction times, skills that I had never shown in anything else I had done.

I remember once when I took a girl friend for a ride in my rally car at an event.

As the car rolled to a halt at the end of the stage, she said to me:
‘I didn’t think you had it in you’

This girl knew me in lots of other settings but she couldn’t imagine that I would be good at anything like this.

I was a bit surprised myself. These supposedly new found skills and abilities were at great odds with the abilities I had demonstrated in my previous twenty years of life.

Do Your Inborn Abilities Ever Change?

Maybe my inborn skills and abilities had changed. Perhaps I had become more skilled at things that I previously was lacking in.

But I concluded that this wasn’t the case.
I was still no good at all those other similar, but slightly different activities.
[This is where an assessment like the Dream Career Finder would have helped me]

Then I began to hear of other stories where other people had suddenly discovered abilities and talents that for the most part of their life appeared absent.

Arthur Miller, in his excellent book The Power of Uniqueness, recounts an example of this.
During WW2, a fellow navy officer’s lack of decisive action almost caused a disaster on their ship. One night when he was in charge of the ship, he realized he was fast on a collision course with another ship that had its lights turned off (as was common during wartime).

The officer froze in action as he was unable to make the necessary decisions to avoid a tragedy. The skipper was immediately called to the tower and managed to avert a collision in the nick of time, much to the shame of the officer involved.

So it was with great astonishment several months later when that same officer found himself in yet another crisis situation that also required fast and competent response. But this time his reaction was dramatically different.

A fire had now broken out in the ship near some explosives after they had taken a hit from shelling.

While most men on board were scrambling to save their own souls, this same officer rallied a group of men and remarkably led them into the danger zone to put the fire out.

Your Dream Career Finder Revealed

On the surface, there appeared to be an extraordinary paradox to these two vastly different responses by the officer.

It looked like two very similar situations.
But as Miller points out, the small subtleties of human uniqueness meant that the officer could respond quite differently in those two situations and when his natural aptitudes or inborn job skills were factored in, it all made sense.
The Dream Career Finder assessment is helpful in identifying these subtleties.

In the case of the fire, he saw that the threat was limited to just a handful of men and the decision didn’t involve assessing radar data and complex decision making under an emergency situation, areas he discovered he was not gifted in.

But that job skills list was not required in the fire emergency.
Skills of quick thinking under a different set of circumstances where needed, and in this case, he responded admirably.
And he was able to respond instinctively.

Small Changes In Our Roles Can Produce Big Changes In Our Career Success

Our unique skills, abilities, and motivations are somewhat perplexing but wonderfully intricate.

I believe that we are so uniquely and intricately wired as human beings that although we may not be good at a whole group of related tasks, a slight change in the application, or a slight change in our motivation for doing something, can have a seismic shift in the way our abilities reveal themselves.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t do practical things particularly fast.
When I was a teenager, I was so much slower than everyone else that when I went potato picking, I was nicknamed “myrtle the turtle“.

And that pretty much sums up the speed at which I did most practical things.
However, I began to notice that if you threw me into an emergency situation, the speed at which I responded was alarmingly fast in contrast to my normal responses.

Now we know that everyone has their adrenalin pumping in an emergency and their speed of responding is usually much faster. But I noticed that mine went beyond that.

I was invariably the one who was leading the charge and would become frustrated at the speed at which other people could respond to the same emergency situation.

Interestingly, I frequently found myself in situations of an emergency nature.

My wife would sometimes ask me when I got home at night “What emergency did you get involved in today”.

I would often find myself coming across a situation that involved me having to call emergency services and help until they arrived.

As I thought about this I began to realize that I had an immense desire to see people in difficulty helped and emergency situations brought under control as quickly as possible. Whether it was a crime scene, an accident scene or natural disasters, my motivation was the same.

Life is a hypocrite if I can’t live the way it moves me

When I traveled to Samoa in 2009 to help with the tsunami disaster relief, I became frustrated with the lack of urgency and planning that involved just about every aspect of the response.

In 99% of my daily living I was not fast at getting practical things done, but tweak the reason for doing something, and the difference in speed and effectiveness became extraordinary. This was the type of thing that I uncovered when I first completed the Dream Career Finder inborn job skills assessment.

Some Gifts Are Easily Identified From An Early Age

Of course in other situations, it is unmistakable to all, that a particular person has immense talent identifiable when they are very young.

When Peter Jackson was only eight years old, a friend of his parents could see his passion for taking photos, so she gave him a movie camera to play with.
He immediately started recording his own movies with his friends. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sir Peter Jackson is now a multiple academy award winner with movies like The Lord of the Rings, King Kong and District 9 to his credit.

Recently I watched a similar scenario unfolding on a documentary on TV about a twelve-year-old boy who had a passion for making movies.
He had become so good at it that he was now starting to get noticed and contacted by film industry professionals.

The parents of this boy made a not too surprising comment when they said:

He works very hard at making these movies, working long hours but we never have to tell him to do it or motivate him in any way.

This is usually a reliable way of identifying a young person’s inborn abilities; they have abundant inbuilt motivation and don’t require any external prodding from parents or others.

My belief is that, not only are we all born with these natural gifts and abilities but they are frequently quite difficult to identify in ourselves.

Can You See Your Own Inborn Job Skills, Abilities, and Talents

It sometimes seems easier to see them in other people.
If you have children, you can often see these abilities in them from a very early age.

You can also often identify them in other people that you know well.

One of my children has a particularly gentle and compassionate nature that was easily identifiable from birth.

As he grew up he showed a naturally kind heart towards his siblings and people in general.
We could see that he could greatly empathize with other people’s pain.

This was something that was not a result of his environment or parental upbringing (my wife will readily attest to my lack of compassion), and none of his other six siblings subsequently showed this attribute so strongly.

His compassion towards others was obvious to me and as someone who had spent many years providing career change advice, I was interested in how that gifting might be put to use later in life.

When our next child was born I was quite surprised to see quite a different situation at hand.

I distinctly remember the events in the birthing room.
He came out of the womb wiggling and fighting like a hooked fish.
When I put my finger out for him to hold he grabbed it with the intensity of a drowning child.

And from that moment on he displayed skills, abilities and personality traits that were vastly different from his brother.

85% of Workers Dissatisfied

The attributes that were so apparent in his brother were nowhere to be seen in him.

But as is the case with everyone, he had his own set of skills and abilities.
One of those was in the area of manual tasks.
He was innately attracted to the building, creating and fixing things from a very early age and his work ethic, speed, and thoroughness at doing those types of activities were quite noticeable.

Workers are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a survey 85 percent of workers are dissatisfied with their work.

– Gallup World Poll

He also began to develop a very mature approach to handling money and before long was earning and saving significant amounts of money.

Once at the age of about nine or ten he had the opportunity to help out a builder who was renovating a shop of ours.

The builder later commented to me how he found him to be such a good worker and how capable he was for his age.
He asked if he could have him back the next day to help.

Workers who find their jobs interesting are more likely to be innovative. Workers have grown increasingly unhappy because fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting…

Linda Barrington, Managing Director of Human Capital at the Conference Board

I could go through my other children and tell you how one of them has shown a fascination with airplanes for as long as we can remember and at the age of nine had begun clocking up hours towards his private pilot’s license.

There is no doubt in his mind, or mine, that he will be flying commercial aircraft in the not too distant future. I give these examples not because my children are different from anyone else’s.

On the contrary, it is my firm belief that every person is born with certain bents that they are naturally predisposed to use, but for many reasons, we are often unaware of them or perhaps they have been swept under the carpet.

Inborn job skills or motivated abilities are recurring skills that are identifiable from an early age.

Motivated Ability was a term coined by Arthur Miller, who noted that after working with a large number of workers as a personnel manager, he realized that people’s abilities were consistently recurring throughout their life.

But most of the time people were unaware of this happening.

He called them ‘motivated abilities’ because when we work with these abilities we are intensely motivated in what we do.

These are also known as natural work abilities, inborn abilities or worker temperaments.

This dream career finder identifies the skills, abilities, and motivations that you will enjoy using the most in your career.

It produces a more superior result than skill assessment software because of the individual depth it probes to uncover a person’s innate inborn work skills.

Before launching into new career training, it is a good idea to take a hard look at what training you really need.
Are you considering it solely to get a new job as fast as possible? Or is it more because of your love for the subject matter, with the possibility that you might use it in a job someday?

What Do The Employers Want?

If you are considering undertaking career training qualifications primarily to help you get a new job, then you should focus on training the employers’ want you to have.

And this can be very different from the career training that colleges, universities and other institutions may be marketing at you.

Many colleges, even non-profit, operate under a business-type model and therefore are trying to market and sell their products (courses) and generate maximum revenue just like businesses do.

But what they are offering does not always line up with the career training that employers want you to have.

Do I Really Need Any Career Training At All?

So the question is:
“What training do I need to have so I can successfully apply for the job?”
But even before you ask yourself that question, a more fundamental one is:
“Do I really need this new career training at all?”

Just because many job advertisements for a particular type of work state that a certain qualification is required to apply for this job, applicants believe it is therefore impossible to get this type of work without this formal training.

A very easy way of exposing this myth is to find out how many people currently doing that type of work do not have that formal qualification.

The answer in many industries will probably surprise you.

How Did They Get The Job Without The Qualifications?

Why do so many advertisements say “must-have XYZ qualification” but many employees in the industry don’t have that formal training?

Part of this discrepancy is that many employees in any given industry did not get the job by responding to an advertisement.

In fact, most jobs are not obtained by applying for an advertised position.
80% of all jobs are secured through the underground job market (i.e.) jobs that are never advertised (my two sons have entered the workforce in recent years and neither of them got their jobs through an advertised position).

If jobs are not advertised, employers never need to address the issue of stipulating qualifications in advertisements as a prerequisite.
On many occasions, employers simply include formal career training as a method of reducing the number of applications.

For every job advertisement placed, there are many very well qualified applicants who do not have formal qualifications.

After Microsoft had become a successful corporation, Bill Gates could have applied for every IT job on the planet and probably would have been offered every single one of them ….. but he never had a college degree! How foolish would it be for employers to exclude him because of this?
Read more about the underground job market.

Choosing The Right Career Training

Here are a couple of pointers that will increase your chances of choosing the right career training when you are responding to advertisements:

Don’t Believe a College or Training Institution’s Own Self-Promotion

Or for that matter, graduate testimonies or comments on review sites.

Like all sectors, training institutions have had their fair share of questionable marketing practices including successful court cases against some of the for-profit organizations.

The best way to know that you are receiving authentic feedback is to talk in person or on the phone to graduates who have graduated within the last few years; or students who are currently in the training program.

This can be done in a couple of ways:
Contact the appropriate department in the College or school and ask if they are willing to provide you contact details of past graduates.

Once you have spoken to one past graduate, ask this person for contact details of other graduates they may know of.

Visit The Campus (if possible)

Talk to the first student you see.
Introduce yourself, explaining that you are considering doing an (e.g.) business degree next year, saying something like “you wouldn’t happen to be studying business management by any chance would you?”

If they say no, simply ask them “do you happen to know anybody who is? …Or anybody who might know someone who is”.
You probably won’t have to ask this question many times before you find somebody studying in your desired field.

Then explain your desire to do this type of study offer to buy them a coffee and ask them gracefully if they would be willing to give you 15 minutes of their time to answer a few questions about the course. Perhaps offer to meet them on campus in a cafe etc. later on.

Prepare a few well thought out questions.
The last question you might want to ask them is something along the lines of “do you happen to know anybody else who would be good to talk to or is in their final year or who have already graduated from this program”.

Then ask if they would mind if you spoke with them as well. Get their contact details.
Follow the procedure again a number of times; telephoning your new contacts, explaining how you got their details and asking if they would be willing to give you 15 minutes of their time over a coffee, etc.

Does this sound like a lot of work?

Yes, but it’s a very small amount of work when you consider the amount of money and time you are about to spend on your new qualification/career training.
The time you spend on this is a little bit of insurance that could save you a lot of regrets and student debt.

What Career Training Do Employers Want Me to Have?

In the final analysis, the employers call the shots on what career training new employees should have.

There is no point in enrolling in an online IT degree or online business degree if employers deem an online degree worthless in these industries.
Or if you were contemplating enrolling in an online counseling degree but most employers in the industry stipulate that all counselors must have face-to-face, on-campus training.

So you should always talk with key employers in the industry and ask them “what pre-employment qualifications/career training do you like to see new employees have and what institutions do you rate the best for providing this qualification?”

Sending an e-mail or better still a hardcopy letter (less likely to get lost in the Inbox) should be able to achieve this.
Or call the HR department.
Or if you have managed to talk with someone who is already working in the industry as a result of step 1 above, then you could contact this person to find out who makes hiring decisions in the organization, then contact that person and ask them the training question outlined above.

New Career Training Doesn’t Mean Lots of Job Offers.

Many graduates become very disillusioned after successfully completing college or other training to discover that it’s still not easy to secure employment.

There seems to be a thought (conscious or subconscious) in the minds of many college attendees that once I have my qualifications, the job offers will flow.
Not so.
Career training qualifications are not a ticket to an easy job search.

Although it can be an essential component of the job application process, the importance of this is often given more weight than it should by job applicants.

Research suggests that personal attributes like a strong work ethic and the ability to get along well with other people are more important to most employers.
Of course, we are not talking here about those careers where qualifications are critical to success and where employers cannot legally employ you without formal career training.

Career Finder Tips will assist you in finding a career that’s exactly right for you? With these career and job search tips, you will learn how to discover a job that inspires and motivates you simply because you will be utilizing your inborn job skills.

Inborn job skills are work-related gifts or abilities that you were born with.

They are the abilities that you are innately drawn to use, often without even knowing it.

When you begin to work in a field that utilizes your inborn job skills you will experience true fulfillment and joy in your work.

Here are my seven career search tips and free job search help to assist you in finding a career you will enjoy.

Career Finder Tip #1

Get to ‘Know Yourself’ better in relation to your inborn skills.

The words of the great philosopher Socrates – ‘Know Thyself’ also happens to be the foundation stone of the very best career selection process that we know of.

Very few of us really know ourselves well in regard to the things that we are good at and enjoy doing.
Most of us have a bit of an idea but it’s usually quite undefined and untested.

Finding out your inborn job skills and abilities that you have had from the day you were born is critical to connecting with the career that you will find most fulfilling

Career Finders Tip #2

Find out how to match your inborn job skills to specific job types in your job search. It’s one thing to know what skills you are good at and enjoy using.
It’s something else to know how to accurately match those skills to specific job types.

Career Finder Tip #3

Landing the job is much easier when you know which organizations in your area have those types of positions.

And by that, I don’t mean that they necessarily have a current vacancy.

Most employers I know are always on the lookout for staff who have the natural abilities to do the work that they need most to have done.

This is irrespective of whether they have a specific vacancy or not.

I know from speaking to many other employers that they are also always open to additional employees if the right one comes along.

So you don’t have to be chasing known vacancies to secure a position.
In fact, there is good evidence to suggest that you should not spend too much of your time chasing “known vacancies”.

More on that later…

Career Finder Tip #4

Find out who the person is in these organizations who have the authority to make hiring decisions.

Career Finders Tip #5

Learn the easiest way to get yourself a job interview [meeting] with that person.

Career Finder Tip #6

Find out how to show that person why they should employ you.
Show them how your abilities really do match what they need.

Show them also how there is a direct correlation between you working for them and increased profits by the company.

Career Finders tip #7

What to do once they’ve said Yes.

So you’ve got the job. Now what do you do to:

• Make good on your promise of being a tremendous benefit to the business.
• Make sure that your natural gifts and abilities continue to be used in exactly the way you and the company most benefit from.

Are You Currently in the Wrong Job

• Have you had a number of jobs in the past that you became bored or frustrated with after a short time?
• Do you feel a deep level of dissatisfaction about your current job but also feel nervous about making changes that may not be any better?

Research suggests that up to 80% of the worlds working population are in jobs that are not matched to their natural inborn job skills.
If that figure is anything close to accurate, then there are a lot of disillusioned workers who struggle in finding a career that brings them fulfillment.

Why Are There so Many People in The Wrong Job

It’s almost like there is a negative force at work trying to stop people from finding out what they are good at and enjoy doing in life.

Yet despite that statistic, there are clearly some people who have had great success in choosing careers and do indeed love their jobs.
There are some people who can genuinely say “I can’t wait to get back to work on Monday”.

Most people laugh at me when I tell them this. Yet there is a small minority of the population where this is true

I love my job

So what is it about those people who love their jobs?
Were they just lucky?
Are they the sorts of people that would be happy in any job no matter what?

Or are they just happy for the moment but soon will be like the rest of us and become bored and frustrated?

I believe that they were able to identify exactly what type of job they would love to do, and set about getting that job.
Although I am unsure why some people are able to do this so easily, I have noticed that amongst this minority, a good percentage of them knew what they wanted to do from a very early age.

If you are not in this minority of people who love their job, then find out what your natural inborn skills are.

by Mike
(New Jersey)

Hello, I’ve been working in Information Technology for five years so far. I have some direction and aspiration for where I’d want to eventually take my career however the time I’ve spent working in IT has really soured me on the industry in general.

First, I’m not a people person. People assume that IT is all sitting behind a computer but there is a heavy customer service element to IT (usually angry, stressed-out customers who have no problem taking out their problems on you) that really turns me off. I’m polite and personable and everyone tells me I’m a good people person but deep down inside I don’t enjoy customer interaction. I’m much more satisfied doing my work, documenting my work, and following structured models and processes. I enjoy solving problems but I absolutely despise being on the receiving end of never-ending complaints.

Secondly, I believe the time and money that needs to be invested in order to advance in IT is not something I’m willing to do considering how much I dislike the customer service aspect. It’s a career that is overstated, easily outsourced, and requires you to climb mountains in order to advance. My current job is very tedious, difficult to deal with day in and day out mentally (the work is entirely not challenging and the volume of work is overwhelming). When I talk to other companies about obtaining a position that will allow me more exposure to technology I’m often told I don’t have enough experience… even for entry-level positions.

Third, I know this has less to do with the field than my current job but I’m currently traveling 2 hours and 15 minutes each direction to get to my job. My work-life balance is totally off and I’m suffering for it. I feel since I’ve been doing this job for a while (three years) my stress and anxiety have hit a point that I can’t live with myself anymore. I get up every day, I do it to the best of my ability, but it’s tearing me apart.

I’m fed up with trying to reinvent myself and knowing very well how IT is a very unrewarding unsatisfying career that is a high-stress environment… I’m considering a career change so as not to waste more time pursuing something I’m not in love with.

My problem is I have no idea what I want to do or where I want to go. My degree is in Information Technology and my student loan debt is such that going back for a second degree is prohibitive. I’m willing to invest time and work to get started in a new career but don’t want to do so lightly.

I really enjoy working on my own and being challenged in my work. I like solving problems and using my mind to overcome problems. I enjoy applying skills that are learned and applied through practice and thought.

Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Simon Replies Hi Mike Let me address your concerns in the order you raise them. Firstly, you say you’re not a people person. Fantastic. That sort of self-knowledge is important as you begin to zero in on your ideal job. The world of work is often broken down into three key areas that a person enjoys working in and is good at: 1. Working with people 2. Working with information and ideas 3. Working with things Most people are dominant in one of these three areas. It’s seems from your post that ‘information and ideas’ is probably your dominant area and perhaps to a lesser extent, ‘working with things’ i.e. computers. If you could eliminate the majority of customer contact in an I.T. role, could such a job provide fulfillment for you? If that were the case, my guess is that there would be a number of I.T. jobs that do exist that contain very little customer service. So the challenge is to find out what those jobs are, which organizations employ such people and to use advanced job search techniques such as accessing the hidden job market to secure one of those positions. However, I’m not convinced that you want to stay in the information technology industry at all. In the first paragraph of your post, you state that “I have some direction and inspiration for where I want to eventually take my career” but I’m not sure on what that direction might be. So the first question to categorically answer is, ‘If I could find my ideal job within the IT industry would I want to stay’? Secondly, you mentioned that you have talked to other companies that could involve a role with greater exposure to technology without the customer service factor, but the reply was that you don’t have enough experience. Let me say this, employers don’t always tell the truth about why they wouldn’t employ you. They often opt for the easiest, most convenient reply. And a lack of experience is a very convenient and commonly used “excuse”. So I would be taking those answers with a grain of salt until you came across some other solid evidence to suggest that you don’t have the experience for the job you would like. Thirdly, spending that much time traveling to and from work, I agree doesn’t sound like a good work-life balance. Whatever a person’s situation is, if it is genuinely “tearing them apart”, then it’s time enact change. But the issue of the geographical location of your job is a different issue to what job I want to do. Of course, these two issues are often ultimately inter-meshed. But to start with, they need to be addressed as separate issues. Your self-knowledge about working on your own, solving problems, using your mind to overcome problems are all great starting points for zeroing in on your ideal job, however, some more work needs to be done to complete this process. I recommend you complete this career assessment as a good first step. This exercise is a very thorough way of identifying and clarifying your motivated abilities, then rating them to see which are the most important to you in a future job. Another thing I would recommend if at all possible is to remove yourself from your working environment for a few days. Get away into the hills or mountains or somewhere peaceful where your mind and heart can function properly. This might also be a great time to complete the above assessment as it promotes thought about work and life direction. I hope this is of some help. Regards Simon