Tests to Find What Kind of Job Fits You
If you're like most people, you spend at least half of your waking day, five days a week, at work. That's a lot of time, so it's very important to have a job that fits you. If you're a bad fit for your job, it can create stress. Stress makes you likelier to get sick and can strain your mental health and home life. Figure out what kind of job you ought to have by taking one of the many different tests available to help you figure it out.
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The Psychology of Career Placement Testing
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Job tests fall under the realm of psychology. They aren't necessarily psychological in their content, but the process of testing to determine your suitability for employment is a psychological exercise. Job tests are, more generally, a test of who you are. They measure your experiences, your skills, your preferences, and attempt to connect those data with the qualities that typically help a worker to succeed in a given job.
Testable Qualities
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Perhaps you would imagine a job test as a questionnaire asking whether you prefer, say, to fly airplanes or give speeches, but there's a lot more to it than that. Job tests look at qualities that are relevant in the world of work. These might include your vocabulary, your diplomatic skills, your honesty, your attention to detail, your artistic preferences, your typing accuracy, your ability to lift heavy objects, your comfort working with other people, your familiarity with computer programming, and much more. As a result there are many different types of job tests. Measuring these qualities gives you an idea of what kind of person you are, and what your abilities are, which in turn helps suggest what kinds of jobs you would do well at.
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Specific Types of Tests
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The Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology website features an excellent list of 9 different types of job tests. These include biographical examinations, cognitive ability tests, interviews, job knowledge assessments, physical ability evaluations, work simulations, and personality sorters. When administered professionally, all of these tests are scientifically valid and can yield valuable information about what kind of job would best fit you.
For High School Students
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Many public high schools have a "career center" where students can go to learn about what they would like to do with their lives after graduating. Career centers provide literature and counseling on career opportunities, and also provide a battery of evaluative tests to measure students' interests and proficiencies. These are excellent resources. If you're in high school and your school has a career center, you should definitely make good use of it.
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References
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