Never Let a Test Tell You What You Should Do!
Posted on March 19, 2016 by Jim Burr, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Assessment instruments are valuable in coaching but they are only tools to be used by the coach and client. Use them but use them wisely.
Career Coaching, to be effective, has to cover three general areas. The first is interests and personality type, the second is abilities and the third is the collection of practical considerations which have to do with getting training, moving, family, compensation, etc. This article is going to focus on the first area.
Determining interests is much more complicated than just someone asking you what you want to do “when you grow up”, though that may certainly be part of it. Nobody is aware of all the different potential careers that exist. Not knowing about a specific job certainly makes it hard to know whether you would be interested in that job. Even being given some information about a job only helps a little. You get an impression about some of the details of the job but not really what it is like day in and day out to do that job. Also missing is good information regarding how the work environment feels. Finally, even if you have all that information you still don’t know how your personality fits in that environment and with the expectations of that job. It is up to the Career Coach to help you find ways to get the information you need and to help you process that information.
The Career Coach has a number of assessment instruments to help you get the information needed. Two that I particularly like to use are the Strong Interest Inventory (SII) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
The SII describes your interests, and personal values in six areas (Occupational Themes). It also measures specific areas within the six occupational themes and compares your likes and dislikes to people who are satisfied working in various occupations. The assumption is that if you have likes and dislikes in common with people who are satisfied with their jobs you are likely to share their interests including their interest in their particular job. The SII will generate lists of possible occupations for your consideration. These lists should be considered examples and a starting point for further exploration.
The MBTI, on the other hand, is a personality assessment. It describes your personality preferences and then applies those preferences to describing your communication style, how you make decisions, how you manage change and how you manage conflict. The report will also recommend ways you can enhance your effectiveness in those four areas. There is a report which combines the SII and the MBTI.
These instruments can be very valuable in starting a search for more specific information about careers likely to be appropriate for you. They provide a wealth of information which can stimulate discussions between you and your coach to help guide the search. This is an extremely important point! Many times I have heard people talk about “taking a test to tell me what I should do”. No assessment instrument is able to do that! Nobody should ever attempt to use such a tool in that way. The tool is an aid to help you and your coach work together to explore options. The report(s) will present a great deal of information and you need to feel free to disagree with any of it. You should then be willing to think about why you disagree and what you think is correct. You then need to discuss your opinion and reasoning with your coach. The coach will listen to your opinion and may accept what you have to say or may offer their own observations and challenge you to consider the issue at greater length. Whatever the outcome of the process it is important to not automatically accept what the report indicates.
Ultimately Career Coaching works best when you and the coach use the information available to you and work through it together. You need to be as objective as possible. This is more difficult for you because you are more emotionally involved. The coach needs to be aware of this when they confront or challenge you so it is done in a caring way but still helps you develop a better understanding of yourself and of your options.
By taking the information presented in the report and working through it in this manner you will gain a lot of insight and be able to develop a much more accurate plan with a better probability of success.
