Try These Career Tests To Help You Choose a College Major

As their name suggests, career tests can help you choose a career. But if you’re currently in college or plan to enroll soon, you could also benefit from taking a career test. These probing examinations can help you select your college major, and they may be especially useful if you’re trying to decide between various attractive possibilities.

Top Three Career Tests for College Majors

The best career tests for college majors will really make you think about who you are and what you want out of life. They require you to carefully evaluate your interests and preferences before answering their questions, and based on the information you provide they will offer you career recommendations that make sense for someone with your personality. Either directly or indirectly, they will also point you toward college majors that would allow you to pursue these various career options.

Here are three superbly conceived and highly informative career tests for college majors that you can take for free right here on the Truity website:

Holland Career Code Test

The Holland Code was developed by Dr. John L. Holland, a psychologist from Johns Hopkins University who found a way to classify people and careers under the same analytical framework.

Under the terms of the Holland Career Code Test, people can be categorized into one of six categories: Builders, Thinkers, Creators, Helpers, Persuaders, or Organizers. (These are names that Truity gives to the six categories. Holland gave them different names, Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional, which you may see when you read up about the Holland Code).  

In the Holland Code universe, jobs map directly to one of these categories, based on the skills that are needed to do that job. The expectations are that a Builder would enjoy carpentry work, a Creator would thrive as a writer, a Helper would make a great nurse, a Persuader would be a natural in the public relations or advertising industry, and so on.

The Holland Career Code Test measures your interest in performing a broad range of tasks that have relevance to work and which clearly fall under one of Dr. Holland’s six categories. From this information, a list of careers suitable for you will be recommended as a part of your test results, and potential areas of study associated with those fields will be listed as well.

DISC Assessment

This intriguing and unique career test was originally developed by psychologist William Moulton Marston in 1928. DISC was a byproduct of Marston’s emotional and behavioral theories, which he believed could be used to identify different personality types and to predict their job performance.

The data you input while taking the DISC test will be used to determine your prime workplace motivation and your overall working style. This will allow you to project yourself into various types of work environments, so you can forecast how you would perform and determine whether you’d be able to find happiness in career fields known to produce such environments.

There are four main working styles in DISC which means the system is really easy to understand. They are:

• Drive (decisive and action-oriented)
• Influence (engaging and persuasive)
• Support (unselfish and generous)
• Clarity (organized and direct)

While everyone will display traits associated with each of these styles from time to time, your DISC assessment will reveal which style is most dominant in your life. This information won’t guide you directly toward a specific college major, but it will help you evaluate whether various fields of study and their associated career options actually harmonize with your prime motivations.

Truity Career Personality Profiler

Truity’s Career Personality Profiler combines the categorization scheme of the Holland Code with the multi-level psychological evaluations offered by the Big Five personality model.

When you take the Career Personality Profiler test you’ll be asked to rate your interest in dozens of work-related assignments. You’ll also be asked to answer questions about your specific personality characteristics.

With this crucial data in hand, the Career Personality Profiler will explain how your most distinctive personality traits predispose you to find success and fulfillment in certain types of careers. You’ll also be provided with an extensive menu of career possibilities that would suit someone with your personality profile. In addition the Profiler will generate a list of academic programs that would prepare someone with your preferences and inclinations for the suggested career choices.

The Career Personality Profiler is one of the most thorough career tests you will ever find. It takes everything relevant into account, supplying you with laser-sharp insights that will energize your quest to find the perfect career.

How to Evaluate the Results of Your Test

Career test results function as an objective source of information. They identify your values, preferences, working style and personality characteristics based on sound psychological theories. These tests are designed to detect subtle patterns and themes you might miss during a self-evaluation.

Nevertheless, you should perform such a self-evaluation, and it should be comprehensive, honest, and as thorough as you can make it. This will give you something to compare your career test results to, as you look for overlaps that will point you in a fruitful direction.

During your self-evaluation, you should ask yourself the following questions (along with any others you think might be relevant):

• What are your interests?
• What are your hobbies?
• What are your greatest strengths?
• How do other people describe you?
• Which of your life accomplishments have brought you the most satisfaction?
• Do you like spending a lot of time with people, or prefer being alone?
• What kind of people do you most like to be around?
• What five adjectives would best describe you?
• What jobs have you held before, and which ones did you like and dislike?
• What do friends and family members praise you for?
• What were your favorite classes in school?
• What were your least favorite classes in school?
• What are your long-term financial goals?
• Where would you like to live in the future?
• Are you interested in working from home (virtually)?
• What career fields do you find most appealing, as of right now?
• Which career fields do you find least appealing, as of right now?
• Do you already have two or three college major options that intrigue you greatly?

This list is extensive. But questions like these require you to think long and hard about what you want to do with your life, and that’s what you should be doing when you’re seriously contemplating your academic and working future.

Career tests also ask you to answer a lot of questions, all of which also require honest self-reflection. The only difference is that your answers will be used to produce an independent report, one that features career recommendations based on formulas developed by professional psychologists.

When you take a personal inventory first, and then later take a career test, you’ll have two valuable sources of information you can cross-correlate. What you’ll likely discover is that your career test results are in harmony with your self-assessment in some instances, and inconsistent with them in others.

In other words, some career fields or specific jobs that were recommended will make total sense to you, given what you know about yourself already. On the other hand, some simply won’t appeal to you, despite your possession of interests and inclinations that are required to thrive in those professions.  You may like working with your hands, for example, and also like science, but still have no interest in becoming a surgeon.

When the data points line up, that is when you should pay the most attention. Career tests uncover vital personality traits and match them with careers that fit those traits, and when the match is a good one it will be reflected in the content of your personal inventory. Those careers—and their associated college majors—will just feel right, and you’ll have both a subjective self-analysis and a more objective expert analysis to back up what your instincts are telling you.