Feature Article: The Relationship Between Personality and Career Type: Step One - Self Assessment
Special Feature: Assessments: Career Assessments Can Shed Light on Career/Job Ailments
A Quintet of Quick Questions: QuintZine's Q&A with a Career Expert: Resume Writer and Coach Cory Edwards
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Web Site of this Issue
Latest Additions: What's New on Quintessential Careers
The Career Doctor: Answering Your Questions
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search
Notes from the Editor: About this Issue...
We annually like to devote an issue of QuintZine to self-assessment, getting to
know yourself better, and applying new self-knowledge to personal and career development. We call it our
ALL ABOUT YOU issue, and this year we look at the relationship between career and personality
with a nice feature by regular contributor Maureen Crawford Hentz. A special feature looks at the benefits
of career assessments to you and your career. We've also completed our annual update of our Quintessential
Careers Online Career Assessment Tools Review; see details below.
Thanks, readers and visitors, for boosting Quintessential Careers to record numbers in January. We enjoyed almost
1.5 million page impressions, with a record 402,217 unique visitors!
As this issue goes to press, we join in our nation's sorrow over the tragedy of the
space shuttle Columbia and its lost crew.
The Relationship Between Personality and Career Type: Step One - Self Assessment
by Maureen Crawford Hentz
Whenever I talk about personality in relation to choosing a career type, invariably someone groans
and tells me a story like this: "Those tests are so stupid. When I was in the sixth grade, I took one of
them and it said that I should be a farmer." I think I also took the same test with the same results, and
while I don't think I would be a very good farmer, the results are probably a lot more accurate than I'd
like to admit. At the time, it seemed ridiculous -- I hated the outdoors and physical exertion, and was
particularly averse to being dirty or sweaty. Now, though, as I think in terms of personality, it might
have had some elements that appeal to my personality: I like long-range planning (good for planning how to
rotate crops), working by myself (for those long days on a tractor), sometimes working on a team (for harvest
time), and being the master of my own destiny (if I don't plant the corn, I can't grow the corn).
Personality tests abound, and some are sheer nonsense.
Be wary of any personality test that claims to be able to
tell you what your dream job is by the type of animal you'd
like to be, or by your favorite breakfast cereal as a child.
While there are many personality assessments that are
statistically valid and tremendously accurate, I'd venture
to say that they are a second (and often expensive) step.
The best personality inventory is self-reflection and
self-awareness.
Career Assessments Can Shed Light on Career/Job Ailments
By Susan Britton Whitcomb
Does your job score a 10 on the satisfaction scale?
If not, it may be time for a career checkup to determine
"what ails you." Where do you start? Career assessments
are an excellent way to do some diagnostic work. This
article presents seven "S's" that underscore the benefits
of career assessments to you and your career.
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We've updated our reviews of free and inexpensive online career assessments. We've weeded out old assessment sites
that are no longer in operation and added some new ones. These tools provide fun and useful
ways to learn more about yourself and to gain food for thought about your career direction:
Go to the review.
Do you know of a free or inexpensive ($30 or less) online assessment that we should feature in our
review? Have any comments about the way we've rated the chart's assessments?
Let us know.
What's the very best assessment for helping an individual determine what career will provide happiness?
"I think the very best assessment for this purpose is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)," says Cory Edwards in the
Q&A interview we did with her. "The MBTI provides a list of chosen professions for people of the same type. It indicates
what professions the different types gravitate to and are the most prevalent in."
Edwards also cites the Personal
Profile System, also called the DiSC, which, she says, "looks at a person's
preferred behaviors in various work situations."
Read more about Edwards' thoughts on career assessments, as well as her great suggestions for generating job leads, her lament
over the troubling trend in which employers require salary information very early in the job-search process, and her ideas on
coping with the lack of feedback in Internet job-hunting in our
Q&A with her.
Based on years of research, the Jackson Vocational Interest
Survey (JVIS) accurately measures your interests, showing how
they relate to the worlds of study and work, and mapping out
your route to an interesting career.
This site offers a nice and growing collection of career and personality assessments, including
The Career Values Scale, Career Interest Inventory, Career Competency Explorer, and The Personality Index.
The free results you get after taking the assessments are a bit sparse, but the comprehensive
results you can purchase are a very good value at $8.95. (No comprehensive report is available for
the Career Competency Explorer.)
Mac users may have difficulty with these tests, as we did, but the technical support and customer
service were exceptional when we reported our troubles. We got a speedy and cordial response.
And, when we took the assessments on a Windows-based machine, we were impressed with the
easy-to-use interface.
According to the site, testingroom.com instruments are validated, reliable, and research based. They are developed
by psychologists and follow the stringent development guidelines of the American Psychological Association.
AND new referral discounts for former customers
and those referred to us by them. Read more.
Latest Additions: New Sites Added to QuintCareers
ACT-SAT-Prep.com
-- a great prep site for college-bound high school students. Besides information,
strategies, and practice questions for the ACT and SAT, there are also resources and links related
to choosing colleges, financial aid, and more.
Future Proof Your Career
-- an 84-question assessment helps the test-taker find fulfilling work and creates a personalized
career strategy as well as your career personality, intelligences and abilities, knowledge worker status,
and learning preference. Free to job-seekers.
job-e-job.com -- where you can find
architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, urban planning, engineering, and other related
employment opportunities. Job-seekers can post your resume and search or browse job listings.
Free to job-seekers.
JustTechJobs.com
-- a job gateway for IT professionals, with more than 45 niche IT job boards based
on IT specialty, such as JustJavaJobs.com, JustUNIXJobs.com, JustPerlJobs.com, etc. Job-seekers
can post your resume or search for jobs (by state, keyword, company, posting date).
Free to job-seekers.
Find even more career and job site additions to Quintessential Careers by visiting our
Latest Additions section.
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Tiffany writes: "I am currently working on a degree in math. I love math, but I do not want to teach it. I have been trying
to figure out other possible careers. I have thought about engineering, but I do not know what kind to choose. I like
to solve problems, and work with equations. My father is an applications engineer. I know that I do not want to do what
he does. I basically just love math and was wondering what some possible career choices I have."
Blane writes: "I'm in search of a profession that I can go to school for in a short period of time with the maximum
benefits (within reason). Can you give me some career suggestions?"
Rose writes: "How can I find out what type of job I would be best suited for based on my qualifications and previous job
experience? I am about to change jobs and am not quite sure what to look for."
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Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
Company of Friends (CoF), Fast Company magazine's readers' network, is a global online and offline community of
self-organizing groups of forward-thinking business leaders and innovators. Members help each other improve their careers,
companies, and communities. Groups formerly were organized based on geography, but new groups based on industries and
interests are also now part of the mix. While these new industry- and interest-related CoF groups are online discussion groups
first and foremost, most of the geographically organized, local CoF groups schedule frequent face-to-face gatherings
to update each other on current business activity, discuss common challenges, develop personal and professional skills,
and leverage resources and tools within the group. CoF groups also schedule speaker series or member-led presentations on
themes and topics addressed in recent issues of Fast Company. Members also communicate via email and online discussion forums.
Find out more and join today.
What careers pay the most in the U.S. right now? Check out the list of the
25 highest paying occupations
on Career InfoNet. The site offers other useful information on employment trends
-- for example a prediction of 100 percent growth in only one career: computer software engineers/applications. Want to know what
occupations are predicted to have the most openings? The top four are retail salespersons; combined food preparation and serving workers,
including fast food; cashiers, except gaming; and waiters and waitresses. In the top 25 with the most predicted openings here are the ones with
the highest median pay: registered nurses ($42,200); general and operations managers ($57,500); elementary school teachers, except
special education ($41,000); secondary school teachers, except special and vocational education ($41,200); sales representatives, wholesale
and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products ($42,200). Other careers in the top 25 predicted to have the most openings and
that provide pretty good incomes are: truck drivers for heavy and tractor-trailer rigs ($21,800 to $47,500); computer support
specialists ($24,900 to $57,900); first-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers ($16,400 to $44,800).
A report on Good Morning America provides some information that overlaps the above and provides some
new information about Hot Top 8 Fields right now.
Pharmacists -- Salary $71K with 5,000 open positions currently.
Electricians -- Salary $37K + lots of overtime with a currently need for 80,000 workers.
Truck Drivers -- Salary $30K with a 10-20 percent increase in need predicted by 2010.
Privacy Officers -- Salary $40-80K.
Security Guards -- Salary $18K with a greater demand for security post-Sept. 11.
Airport Screeners -- Salary $29K with particular demand for women, because of a 50 percent quota that must be met.
Mortgage Broker/Banker -- Salary $42K.
Teacher -- Salary $40K with a need for 2.4 million teachers predicted by 2012.
We'd Love You to Link to Quintessential Careers!
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Web site, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
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QuintZine: Topics in Upcoming Issues
WATCH FOR feature articles on these topics in upcoming
issues of QuintZine:
* Time to Change Jobs…or Careers? A Quintessential Careers Quiz
* Crafting a successful e-mail resume
* The interview as sales call
* Getting the raise you deserve
* 10 things I wish I'd known before starting my first job
* Letters of recommendation
* Employer research: step by step
* Learn about careers through job-shadowing
* 10 job-search reality checks
* Is job flexibility right for you?
* First days on the job: Strategies to get ahead
* Dealing with a bad boss
* Making your case for telecommuting
* A day in the life of a recruiter
* Don't wait by the phone: Following up on all job leads
* Dining etiquette
* The relationship between personality and career choice
* What employers are really looking for
* New series: 10 mistakes to avoid in: resumes, cover letters, interviews, salary
negotiation, career change, networking, job-search
* Quintessential Career Profiles of YOU, our readers
* Q&As with well-known career experts
* Book reviews
. . . and much, much more!
Don't ever want to miss another issue of QuintZine? Get a free subscription to
the email version of QuintZine by completing our
subscription form.
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Quintessential Careers also offers writing services
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Need a speaker for your career-oriented conference or
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