What Color Is Your Parachute? (30 page)

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Okay, so you’ve got to choose a new career. Or, maybe, if you’re just starting out, you’ve got to choose your very first career.

So, what do you do? Left to our own instincts, most of us will opt for taking a test of one kind or another.

Easy enough to do.

In the U.S. three-quarters of all job-hunters or career-changers have access to the Internet. And tests are everywhere on the Internet.
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Except, “tests” are not really “tests.” “Instruments” or “assessments” would be a more accurate description. Nonetheless, everyone loves to call them “tests.” “Vocational tests.” “Psychological tests.” Whatever. You can take them all by yourself. That’s their virtue.

Or, if you don’t want to tackle them all by yourself, you can pay a career coach or career counselor to give them to you (
listings in the back, beginning
here
). Some make
testing
the cornerstone of everything
they do with a client
.
So, they’re experienced. One way or another, take a test, and voilà! The test will tell you what you should do, or what you should become.

Or will it?

1. You are absolutely unique. There is no person in the world like you. It follows from this that no test can measure YOU; it can only describe the family to which you belong.

Tests tend to divide the population into what we might call groups, tribes, or families—made up of all those people who answered the test the same way. After you’ve taken any test, don’t ever say to yourself, “This must be who I am.” (No, no, this must be who your family am.)
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I grew up in the Bolles family (surprise!), and they were all very “left-brained.” I was a maverick in that family. I was right-brained. Fortunately, my father was an immensely loving man, who found this endearing. When I told him the convoluted way by which I went about figuring out something, he would respond with a hearty affectionate laugh, and a big hug, as he said: “Dick, I will never understand you.” Tests are about families, not individuals. The results of any test are descriptors—not of you, but of your family—i.e., all those who answered the test the same way you did. The SAI family. Or the blue family. Or the INTJ family. Or whatever. The results are an accurate description of that family of people, in general; but are they descriptors also of you? Depends on whether or not you are a maverick in that family, the same way I was in mine. These family characteristics may or may not be true in every respect of you. You may be exactly like that group, or you may be different in important ways.

2. Don’t predetermine how you want the test to come out. Stay loose and open to new ideas.

It’s easy to have an emotional investment that the test should come out a certain way. I remember a job-hunting workshop where I asked everyone to list the factors they liked about any place where they had ever lived; and
then prioritize those factors, to get the name of a new place to live. We had this immensely lovable woman from Texas in the workshop, and when we all got back together after a “break” I asked her how she was doing. With a glint in her eye she said, “I’m prioritizing, and I’m gonna keep on prioritizin’, until it comes out:
Texas!”
That was amusing, as she intended it to be; it’s not so amusing when you try to make the test results come out a certain way. If you’re gonna take tests, you need to be open—to new ideas. If you find yourself always trying to outguess the test, so it will confirm you on a path you’ve already decided upon, then testing is not for you.

3. In taking a test, you should just be looking for clues, hunches, or suggestions, rather than for a definitive picture that tells you exactly what you should do with your life.

And bear in mind that an online test isn’t likely to be as insightful as one administered by an insightful psychologist or counselor, who may see things that you don’t. But keep saying that mantra to yourself, as you read or hear the test results. Clues. Clues, I’m only looking for clues.

4. Take several tests and not just one. One can easily send you down the wrong path.

People who do a masters or doctorate program in “Testing and Measurement” know that tests are notoriously flawed, unscientific, and inaccurate. Sometimes tests are more like parlor games than anything else. Basing your future on tests’ outcomes is like putting your trust in the man behind the curtain in
The Wizard of Oz
.

5. You’re trying, in the first instance with tests, to broaden your horizons, and only later narrow your options down; you are
not
trying to narrow them down from the outset.

Bad career planning looks like this:

Most computerized tests embody the idea of starting with a wide range of options, and narrowing them down. So, each time you answer a question, you narrow down the number of options. For example, if you say, “I don’t like to work out of doors,” immediately all outdoor jobs are eliminated from your consideration, etc., etc.

A model of good career planning looks like this, instead:

Good career-choice or career planning postpones the “narrowing down,” until it has first broadened your horizons, and expanded the number of options you are thinking about. For example, you’re in the newspaper business; but have you ever thought of teaching, or drawing, or doing fashion? You first expand your mental horizons, to see all the possibilities, and only then, do you start to narrow them down to the particular two or three that interest you the most.

So, what’s a good test?
All together now:
a test that shows you more possibilities for your life.

And, what’s a bad test?
Again, together:
a test that narrows the possibilities for your life. Often this is the result of a counselor’s interpretation of a test, or rather misinterpretation.

I’ll give you an example: I met a man who, many years before, had taken the Strong Inventory.
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He was told, by his counselor, that this inventory measured that man’s native gifts or aptitudes. And, in his particular case, the counselor said, the inventory revealed he had no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. For years thereafter, this man told me, “I was afraid to even pick up a hammer, for fear of maiming myself. But there finally came a time in my life when my house needed aluminum siding, desperately, and I was too poor to hire anyone else to do it for me. So I decided I had to do it myself, regardless of what the test said. I climbed the ladder, and expected to fail. Instead, it was a glorious experience! I had never enjoyed myself so much in my whole life. I later found out that the counselor was wrong. The inventory didn’t measure aptitudes; it only measured current interests. Now, today, if I could find that counselor, I would wring his neck with my own bare hands, as I think of how much of my life he ruined with his misinterpretation of that test.”

6. Testing will always have “mixed reviews.” On the one hand, you can run into successful men and women who will tell you they took this or that test twenty years ago, and it made all the difference in their career direction and ultimate success.

Other men and women, however, will tell you a horror story about their encounter with testing, like that above.

If you like tests, help yourself. Counselors can give them to you, if you shop around. There are also lots of them on the Internet.

If you want to know where to start, you might try these, which are the tests that I personally like best:

• The Princeton Review’s Career Quiz
  www.princetonreview.com/cte/quiz/default.asp?menuID=0&careers=6
  

• Carolyn Kalil’s True Colors Test
  www.truecolorscareer.com/quiz.asp
  

• Dr. John Holland’s Self-Directed Search
  www.self-directed-search.com
  

• Supplemented by the University of Missouri’s Career Interests Game
  http://career.missouri.edu/students/majors-careers/skills-interests/career-interest-game
  

• If you want further suggestions, you can go to my website
  www.jobhuntersbible.com/counseling