Assessments Are Good for Everyone.

Today we have assessments for everything. Anyone who’s taken a Buzzfeed quiz about which movie star they should be dating has experienced an assessment. Career assessments have been used in education for generations, and not surprisingly, we’ve used them as a way to help decide career paths for over a century. However, thanks to AI and machine learning we’re moving into an era of career assessments that is making them a very powerful and effective tool for getting people moving on the right career path.

Why Use Assessments?

using career assessments can be a great aid in choosing the correct career path

The selection of a career is a complex and lengthy process. Anyone can go out and find a job. It is imperative that we take a deep look at our strengths, weaknesses, values, and goals before we move forward. The most crucial goal of career assessment is to take an honest look at strengths and weaknesses and find out what they are and what it means. We are able to discover ourselves, including our weakness, strengths, perception, aptitude, ambitions, and interests, which lead to our determination to choose the right career path. We gain more self-knowledge through the career valuation test.

Psychologists design the career assessment tool to assist people in understanding themselves a little better. The assessment generally consists of a series of multiple-choice questions. Sometimes, it may also require answers to subjective-type questions. There is no specific correct or incorrect response and hence no pass or fail criteria in this test. This is just a tool that assesses you on specific parameters like interests, personality traits, aptitude, values, and skills.

The answers that you give in the test are assessed on these parameters, and then it is matched with the needs of prospective careers. As a result, a plan of action can be developed that will, eventually lead us to the right starting point for a rewarding career. In the end a good detailed career assessment can do four very important things.

It can give us a strong indication of the right direction to take
Improve self-esteem by understanding yourself better and recognizing that we have strengths and positive attributes that employers want.
Show us areas where we can improve so that we can continue to grow as people.
Give us directions so that we do not waste time when we search for careers or career paths that match our strengths, values, and dreams.

Assessments: In The Beginning

When Frank Parsons created the Vocational Bureau of Boston in 1908 he was at the cutting edge of an exploding idea of the work experience that originated in the first flames of the Industrial Revolution. Not long after the start of the movement to find everyone the right job, an assessment was created to help quantify the movement. This assessment was created by Edward Strong in 1927 and called, surprisingly, the Strong Interest Inventory(SII).

Strong’s idea was that individuals are more satisfied and productive when their occupations are in line with their interests and when they work with other people who share those interests. It asked people for their interests in certain careers, occupational activities, hobbies, and leisure activities. Believe it or not, it’s still in use today.

But the SII was very simple and rudimentary. As we all know, the number of assessments has exploded over the last half of the twentieth century. According to those who have studied this, there have been six stages in the development of career counseling and assessment in the United States.

career assessments now play a key part of a job applicants evaluation by a hiring company

The Stages of Assessment usage

1st stage (1890-1919), placement services were offered for an increasingly urban and industrial society.
2nd stage (1920–1939), educational guidance through the elementary and secondary schools became the focal point.
3rd stage (1940–1959) saw the focus shift to colleges and universities and the training of counselors.
4th stage (1960–1979) was the boom for counseling and the idea of work having meaning in a person’s life came to the forefront; organizational career development began during this period.
5th stage (1980–1989) saw the beginning of the transition from the industrial age to the information age and the growth of both the independent practice of career counseling and outplacement counseling.
6th stage (1990—present), with its emphasis on technology and changing demographics, has seen an increased sophistication in the uses of technology, the internationalization of career counseling, the beginnings of multicultural career counseling, and the focus on the school-to-job transition.

And it’s this increased use of sophisticated technology that has created a boon in not just the number of career assessments but the accuracy and efficacy. We’re truly moving into an age of career assessments that are making it easier for people of all ages to understand their desires, interests, goals and values in ways that make finding a career that works for them simpler, faster and more effective.

Assessments Are Getting Better Every Day

Today there are assessments for just about everything. They have become so specialized that there is nothing that can’t be uncovered by sitting at your computer for a few minutes and answering some questions. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites that have different styles of vocational assessment. You can take tests that will tell you something different every time. But what does that mean?

It means that these assessments aren’t always measuring the right things and not always putting people in the right positions. It’s important that the desired outcomes are clear and that the assessment has a track record of being right. You can take an Enneagram test and get a completely different set of results from a Myers-Briggs or any other website and it can become confusing.

That’s why people are working tirelessly to fine-tune assessments and make sure that the results are consistent and accurate. Companies like MyInnerGenius, which is associated with IBM is at the forefront of creating the types of in-depth assessments that create detailed and consistent results that work.

Another element that’s being introduced into the world of assessments is AI. In the world of vocational assessments that can stand for either Artificial Intelligence or Augmented Intelligence. Either way they both have a strong role to play in the modern assessment.

In speaking with Denise Leaser at MyInnerGenius she described the assessment as augmenting HR by identifying innate skills and passions by introducing a solution which can identify the personality traits and natural skills and abilities of candidates to match them to careers they will love. It will allow people to focus more on creativity and innovation and less on the mundane.

career assessments take bias out of the evaluation of a job applicants talents and skills.

The benefits of AI, this time Artificial Intelligence, in the new vocational assessment are numerous. The most important addition to the information collection is that they truly focus on true, human activities. They add human insight by looking beyond the numbers to identify strengths that might not be obvious. We now are digging deeper into the actual wants and needs of the test taker and finding out what really gets them fired up about a particular career.

And we’re also able to reduce the bias of tests across gender, race and socio-economic status. The bias that has been inherent in these tests can be diminished by using AI to help craft the way the questions are asked that resonate along all lines. This gives the people using the results to get a clear picture of what the candidate on their screen has that may make them a perfect candidate. Removing bias allows for the removal of names and locations – people are really being hired based on their attributes alone.

Current assessments are finding hidden insights that were before unseen. An additional layer of information that is hard to see on the surface can be collected and analysed. It’s this type of insight that makes AI powered assessments such a boon for the disabled community. By leveling the playing field and digging for things that someone can’t see on an interview, people with disabilities are able to compete for jobs that many may have thought wouldn’t be available to them.

And that’s why we think that assessments are good for you. Good for all of us. By bringing in these new stronger attributes, HR professionals are able to create a more complete picture of the candidates that come across their desks. That’s because it allows the candidate to really express themselves. When a student takes an AI powered assessment they are really going to get a clear picture of what they’re good at, what they value, and what type of career path is right for them. Candidates can look at themselves and really say, “I’m good at this” and mean it.

Add to that powerful assessment the known positives of sending students into a CTE pathway that allows them not just see the jobs, but the courses, the certificates, and the road to getting to the correct job for their success. This is why Career Day has gone the extra mile with MyInnerGenius Assessments to create an assessment that produce answers and empowers the students who take it. They know they’re going in the right direction and the hiring managers on the end can trust that they’re the right person for the job!

For information about how Career Day interfaces with MyInnerGenious and our collection of job preparation courses, please Contact Us.