Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Job-Hunting on the Internet
Part I: Career Exploration
Chapter 1: Using the Internet to Guide Your Career Choice
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The Internet offers lots of tools that provide food for thought about careers that match your interests, skills, and personality.
One of the questions we hear most often from readers of QuintZine (our biweekly e-zine) and visitors to Quintessential Careers is: "How can I figure out what I really want to do with my career?" It's certainly true that you can't make much headway in finding a job if you haven't yet determined what you want to be when you grow up. Variations on this dilemma include the older, more established job-seeker who has decided his or her career isn't a good fit but isn't sure what career would be more satisfying.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could take a simple, interactive test on the Internet at minimal or no cost that would give you the answers you need about what career best suits you? Some experts -- primarily Webmasters of free and inexpensive online assessment sites -- say you can do just that. Others -- primarily career counselors -- assert that it's not that simple.
The fact is that there are several sites on the Web where you can take a free or inexpensive (less than $30) interactive test that will suggest career possibilities. Others can give you information about your personality "type" and how well suited it is to particular career choices.
The controversy, especially among scholars and career counselors, arises over whether these free online tests are reliable and accurate. Perhaps more importantly, they argue, should a job-seeker trust any career-oriented assessment without a career counselor's interpretation and guidance?
We know of only one scholarly study of free online assessments, "Career assessment on the Internet: An exploratory study," by Laurel W. Oliver and Jason S. Zack. Published in 1999 in the Journal of Career Assessment, the study was, like almost anything written about the Internet, outdated as soon as it hit print. The wheels of the academic press grind slowly, and the lag time between the time the article was researched and when it appeared in print was about a year. Many of the online assessments the authors researched in 1998 no longer exist; newer ones aren't covered in the study.
In any case, using purely subjective evaluations, Oliver and Zack concluded that the 24 no-cost career assessments they studied were “neither good nor poor.” Among the problems the authors identified with the assessments were:
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