Multiple Choice

ADVERTORIAL: Can a simple quiz tell you what to be when you grow up?

by Jason Tomassini

ADVERTORIAL CONTENT

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The guidance counselor, ever-so-close to his lunch break, desperately looking for a way to get you out of his office satisfied in time for the first batch of Sloppy Joe's at the cafeteria, plops a sheet of paper and a pen down in front of you. This, he says while looking nervously at his watch, will determine the rest of your life.

The dreaded career quiz.

Invariably, the results of those tests — astronaut, member of congress, rock star — are lost in the shuffle. So when people inevitably find themselves at a later point in life again wondering, "What do I really want to do?" there are still many career quizzes for both students and adults, hoping to provide a guiding light.

Popular job sites like Monster and Career Builder have free and paid career surveys, The Princeton Review offers one for students looking for a major or career path and extensive tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory are deployed by career service centers in many of the city's universities.

Regardless of which method you use to help find the right career, the question still remains: Do they actually work?

"I don't think career quizzes are good in isolation; I think they need some processing," says Nancy Dudak, director of career services at Villanova. "If they are taken in isolation they can be puzzling or even harmful, but with some perspective, they can be helpful."

In order to gain that perspective, I decided to take a few and see how the results matched up with my current career (journalist, obviously).

I decided to go with the ones offered at the two biggest job boards, Monster and Career Builder, to see if I was on the right career path.

Both sites offer a variety of quizzes with varying degrees of involvement and cost, but I went with the simple, free-of-charge surveys because they are easily accessible.

At Monster, readers are given four pairs of opposite "personality preferences" (i.e. Introvert vs. Extrovert), and choose which personality they best exemplify in the workplace.

The combination of the four personalities chosen yields an overall employee profile with about 15 jobs specific to that profile. While a few seemed to fit the mold — news analyst, media planner, freelance writer (Bingo!) — others, like Chief Financial Officer and biomedical researcher, not so much. How could I put that into perspective?

"Don't look at just what it's saying," says Lisa DeLuca, assistant director of student services at Drexel's LeBow College of Business. "If it's saying you should be a farmer or a preacher and you want to do something in business, think in terms of what skills and attributes those careers are telling you."

In other words, I'm never going to be a biomedical researcher, but some characteristics — "imaginative," "intellectually curious" — that are common for that job can be applied within one of my preferred fields.

At Career Builder, they have the Career Planner Quiz. It asks 24 questions, half of which the reader is given two jobs and asked to pick the more appealing one (i.e. Interior Designer vs. Insurance Agent). For the other 12 questions, the reader is given an antithetical pair of characteristics and asked to pick which one is most accurate (i.e. solving technical problems vs. people problems).

For the results, the reader is given a color-coded score for their "Style" and "Interests," with each color corresponding with a personality and a list of potentially attractive careers. Lo and behold, Editor, Journalist and Teacher were right on the top of my results; Career Builder had the advantage.

Not so fast. I also went to The Princeton Review, a resource for high school and college students trying to determine a major or career path and they had a survey nearly identical to Career Builder's: 24 questions, exact same format. When I filled out my answers, I expected to see the same results...

Systems Analysis, Tax Law, Government Work.

Alright what do I make of this?

"A lot of the value is having people help you interpret it," DeLuca says. "Have someone walk you through what those results mean so you can learn your strengths and what industries you want to target them towards."

OK, I think I got it.

Hmm, I wonder if any high schools need a guidance counselor.